Trying something new: feeding old print gazetteers through modern OCR + open LLMs + our newly-expanded index to see how much can be turned into searchable, mappable data. Read more at blog.whgazetteer.org?p=434 Play with it: worldhistoricalgazetteer.github.io/gazetteer-of...

🕵️We're transcribing and geocoding all 7 volumes of "A Gazetteer of the World" (1856), a monumental work edited anonymously by "a Member of the Royal Geographical Society" @rgs.org - can anyone suggest who that might have been, and why they might not have been named? archive.org/details/agaz...

Want to map your dataset like this? Our free Reconciliation API matches your place-names phonetically against over 67 million historical & modern toponyms from GeoNames, Wikidata, Pleiades, Getty TGN & more, and returns coordinates. Works with OpenRefine too!📍 docs.whgazetteer.org/content/tech...

Stephen Gadd@docuracy.co.uk · 3mo ago

Companion to the Datini Letters map: a new Voyages explorer for the Melis archive. 3,393 Mediterranean ship records (1379–1492). Arcs coloured by predominant vessel type per route. Ports geocoded via @whgazetteer.org. docuracy.github.io/datini/viagg... #DigitalHumanities #DH #MedievalMed

🌍 Ports are now (optionally) shown on the eRutter to help with route picking. 🤔 They're currently fetched from @wikidatacommunity.bsky.social, but this would be a great use case for a @whgazetteer.org temporal API to filter out modern ports and highlight ancient ones.

Stephen Gadd@docuracy.co.uk · last yr.

🪄Historical Sea Routing is now much quicker to load, reload, and compute seasonally-plausible sailing routes, thanks to some behind-the-scenes browser magic. Find a 6500-mile return trip in under 1 second! 🛟 Do you have historical voyage data which might help with calibration? [1/3]

🧭 Building a lightweight sea-routing graph for historical GIS & DH use cases beyond simple port-to-port hops. Edges are weighted for ~5km coastal preference. Aiming for serverless exploration of connectivity in historical maritime trade. ⚓️ #MaritimeHistory #HistoricalGIS #DigitalHumanities

Want to work with the WHG team? The Institute for Spatial History Innovation @ Pitt is hiring a full-time Research Associate to be the Digital Data Specialist & Managing Editor of World Historical Gazetteer! Learn more & apply by July 11: bit.ly/4kAknki @rmostern.bsky.social @docuracy.co.uk

This week on my blog I wrote about my methodology in discerning modern placenames from the 16th century counterparts in Thevet’s “Singularitez.” Part of the translation I’m preparing for publication. #earlymodern #frhistory wednesdayblog.org/2025/05/21/o...

On Toponymy

This week, the first in several scribblings about my research: how I connect historic places in my sources with their modern names.

wednesdayblog.org

🌍 Recent updates to the WHG user interface give faster loading and globe visualisations. Image: Indigenous Place Names in North America, a WHG Place Collection at doi.org/10.60681/whg... Explore more at: whgazetteer.org ! #DigitalHumanities #HistoricalGIS #GeoHumanities #HistoricalGeography

📍What's the Point? Usually (on our maps) a proxy for a place, but we could be more precise, with ... approximation! Might points have a ‘tolerance’ circle? Should polygons show when they contain something more vague? #LinkedPlaces #SpatialData #HistGIS #LinkedPasts github.com/WorldHistori...