The World Historical Gazetteer (WHG) is a platform for linking records about historical places, which allows you to make spatial connections across time and language. The goal of the project is to create content, standards and the digital infrastructure for a spatially and temporally referenced index of world historical place names and a linked data ecosystem, standards, and user tools to support collaborative digital and data-driven historical scholarship at the global scale.
What Can You Do with the WHG?
You can use the platform to:
Discover. Search across 2 million place records and browse over 00 published datasets and collections.
Build. The Gazetteer Workbench offers three pathways to augment and publish historical place data as individual datasets, multiple datasets, or place collections.
Teach. Encourage students to explore history through place names using sample lesson plans or let them map their own collection of places.
Learn about the newest version of WHG here: https://github.com/WorldHistoricalGazetteer/website/releases/tag/v3.2
History of the Project
In May of 2017, WHC Director Dr. Ruth Mostern was awarded a research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Program to build the World Historical Gazetteer (whgazetteer.org).
WHG version 1 launched in Summer 2020 following three years of development. Version 1 contained a suite of tools that allow users to upload place datasets into a private workspace, augment them by reconciling them against the Getty Thesaurus of Geographical Names and Wikidata, publish them as Linked Open Data, and contribute them for accessioning to the WHG index. By the release of version 1, the WHG indexed 1.8 million modern place references and approximately 60,000 temporally scoped records.
Version 2, supported primarily by the Humanities Cluster of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, debuted in Summer 2021. Version 2 added new features and made several significant improvements to usability including: improved search, faster reconciliation review, improved upload functionality, and faster and more accurate reconciliation to Wikidata. Version 2 also contains a Collections feature where users have the ability to link multiple datasets and to build personal sets of accessioned records based on their interests.
In 2023, the WHG was awarded a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (DHAG), co-funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). This support enable the launch of Version 3 in the summer of 2024.
The Asian Studies Center at Pitt is supported the development of the Teaching with WHG section of the site and the Place Collection feature introduced in v2.1. The Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies supported development of content for that broad region including the Historical Gazetteer of Central Asia.