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Bringing places from the distant past to the present: a report on the World Historical Gazetteer

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Abstract

This article is a report about the progress and current status of the World Historical Gazetteer (whgazetteer.org) (WHG) in the context of its value for helping to organize and record digital and paleographic information. It summarizes the development and functionality of the WHG as a software platform for connecting specialist collections of historical place names. It also reviews the idea of places as entities (rather than simple objects with single labels). It also explains the utility of gazetteers in digital library infrastructure and describes potential future developments.

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Notes

  1. http://dhawards.org/dhawards2021/

  2. Linda Hill, Georeferencing: The Geographic Associations of Information (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 91-92.

  3. Ryan Shaw, “Gazetteers Enriched: A Conceptual Basis for Linking Gazetteers with Other Kinds of Information,” in Placing Names: Enriching an Integrating Gazetteers, ed. Merrick Lex Berman, Ruth Mostern, and Humphrey Southall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 52.

  4. Ruth Mostern and Humphrey Southall, “Gazetteers Past: Placings Names from Antiquity to the Internet,” in Placing Names: Enriching an Integrating Gazetteers, ed. Merrick Lex Berman, Ruth Mostern, and Humphrey Southall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 15-24; Ryan Shaw, “Gazetteers Enriched: A Conceptual Basis for Linking Gazetteers with Other Kinds of Information,” in Placing Names: Enriching an Integrating Gazetteers, ed. Merrick Lex Berman, Ruth Mostern, and Humphrey Southall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 51-63.

  5. Hill, “Gazetteers and Gazetteer Services,” in Georeferencing; ISO 19112:2019 Geographic information – Spatial referencing by geographic identifiers, https://www.iso.org/standard/70742.html.

  6. Linked Places format, https://github.com/LinkedPasts/linked-places-format

  7. See for example, Tessa Hauswedell, Julianne Nyhan, M.H. Beals, Melissa Terras, and Emily Bell, “Of global reach yet of situated contexts: an examination of the implicit and explicit selection criteria that shape digital archives of historical newspapers,” in Archival Science 20 (2020): 139-165; Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra, “The risk of losing thick description: Data management challenges Arts and Humanities face in the evolving FAIR data ecosystem,” Halshs-021155055, 2019; Adela Jarolimkova and Barbora Drobikova, “Data Sharing in Social Sciences: Case Study on Charles University,” in S. Kurbanoğlu et al. (eds) Information Literacy in Everyday Life. ECIL 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 989 (2019) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13472-3_52; Ruth Mostern and Marieka Arksey, “Don’t Just Build It, The Probably won’t Come: Data Sharing and the Social Life of Data in the Historical Quantitative Social Sciences,” in International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 10, no. 2 (October 2016): 205-224.

References

  1. Grunewald, S., Mostern, R., Grossner, K.: The world historical gazetteer: a digital humanities interface for transregional research, In: TRAFO: Blog for Transregional Research (2022), https://trafo.hypotheses.org/33401.

  2. Grunewald, S., Janco, A.: Finding places in text with the world historical gazetteer, In: Programming Historian (February 2022), https://doi.org/10.46430/phen0096

  3. “Walkthrough: Create and upload an LP-TSV file,” World Historical Gazetteer, https://whgazetteer.org/tutorials/create_lptsv/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. World History Center, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA

    Karl Grossner, Susan Grunewald & Ruth Mostern

  2. Department of History, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, USA

    Susan Grunewald

  3. Department of History, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA

    Ruth Mostern

Authors
  1. Karl Grossner
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  2. Susan Grunewald
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  3. Ruth Mostern
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Correspondence to Ruth Mostern.

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Grossner, K., Grunewald, S. & Mostern, R. Bringing places from the distant past to the present: a report on the World Historical Gazetteer. Int J Digit Libr 24, 159–162 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-022-00341-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-022-00341-2

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