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...

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

🔔 A heavy church bell meant a heavy cart and a way capable of bearing it. Can the spread of bells >5cwt from their foundries serve as a proxy for pre-modern wheeled-transport networks, at least where navigable waterways can be ruled out? 1/5 #HistoricalGIS #EconomicHistory #TransportHistory

How @camunicampop.bsky.social researchers are turning static snapshots of Victorian Britain into dynamic life histories. The team are linking over 200 million census records, revealing how people moved, worked and lived in ways never before possible. 🔎 Read on 👉 www.hist.cam.ac.uk/news/tracing...

New in the Datini Letters explorer: click any city to focus on its correspondence routes. Shareable links capture the full state of the view. docuracy.github.io/datini/#mode... #MedievalSky #DigitalHumanities

Stephen Gadd@docuracy.co.uk · 3mo ago

✉️ Explore 145,000 medieval merchant letters as a live map: the correspondence network of Francesco di Marco Datini (c.1363–1412), spanning Florence to Barcelona to North Africa. Visualise routes, travel times & seasonality. docuracy.github.io/datini/ #DigitalHumanities #MedievalHistory

✉️ Explore 145,000 medieval merchant letters as a live map: the correspondence network of Francesco di Marco Datini (c.1363–1412), spanning Florence to Barcelona to North Africa. Visualise routes, travel times & seasonality. docuracy.github.io/datini/ #DigitalHumanities #MedievalHistory

Medieval Markets & Fairs in England & Wales: remember the excellent dataset published back in 2003? I've given it a snazzy new interface, incorporating various updates which were made following publication. Separately, I'm working on extending it to 1846... ihr-digital.github.io/markets-and-...

Fun piece by @justincolson.bsky.social and Werner Scheltjens. My job on this project is to turn messy medieval records into a tidy database so that my colleagues can more easily spot trends in fashion, industry, and commercial networks. theconversation.com/medieval-lon...

Medieval Londoners’ cheaply imported mass-produced Christmas gifts look surprisingly familiar

We often imagine medieval life as dull, dirty and short, with little in the way of material comfort or decoration. However, medieval Londoners were importing toys, treats and trinkets by the boatload ...

theconversation.com

(4) Linking Knowledge Through Place: ISHI, WHG, and the Future of Gazetteer Collaboration, with @rmostern.bsky.social @docuracy.co.uk, Alexandra Loranna, Palak Vashist. Look at Institute for Spatial History Innovation & World Historical Gazetteer. Register to participate at forms.gle/dzSq2GibT17n...

Linking Knowledge Through Place: ISHI, WHG, and the Future of Gazetteer Collaboration

Description: This activity focuses on advancing collaborative methods for historical place alignment across gazetteers and related datasets within the Pelagios community. It brings together members of...

forms.gle

Linked Pasts 11 programme (December 1–5 and some 8–12) linkedpasts.hcommons.org/2025/11/09/l...

This week's fungi for #FungiFriday.

Today I start my research trip sailing down the River Seine from Paris to Honfleur (via a few stops) in a reconstruction of the Klåstad cargo ship built in 998. It’s the penultimate stage in the ship’s journey from Rome to London throughout the summer. I’ll post updates as we go #Saga25 #MedievalSky

Hours of fun spent realigning my foolishly London-centric assumptions about medieval European trading networks. Shetland, for example, was far from peripheral: a non-Mercator map-projection helps. I've rebuilt the journey-timed, square-rigged sailing algorithm for docuracy.github.io/Historical_S...

Thanks, @drpda.bsky.social, this looks like a really useful source, as it includes dates and waypoints for a number of long-distance voyages. 👏 I'd love to get hold of Paula Martin's transcript, though: any suggestions of how I might do that?

Philip Allfrey@drpda.bsky.social · last yr.

This is impressive work, I wish I had a use case for it! For a paleography course I took a decade ago we looked briefly at a journal of a 17th century Scots mariner. It's been digitised at collections.st-andrews.ac.uk/item/journal... Paula Martin made a transcription, but I don't know if it's online

🌍 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]

🪄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]

🌍 I've just published this here docuracy.github.io/Historical_S... for anyone to play with. Screenshots, code, and caveats at github.com/docuracy/His....

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

🧭 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

🧭 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

Medieval England’s Road Network Mapped Using the Gough Map. www.medievalists.net/2025/05/medi...

Medieval England’s Road Network Mapped Using the Gough Map - Medievalists.net

A new study uses the Gough Map to reconstruct medieval England’s road network, revealing how Roman routes shaped travel for centuries.

medievalists.net

🌍 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

Discover 17th century travel through the eyes of John Walker in our new release. Edited by Anthea Jones. www.hobnobpress.co.uk/books/p/john...

John Walker's Commonplace Book: A Traveller in the 1670s, edited by Anthea Jones — Hobnob Press

Travelling for pleasure in the 1670s required plenty of stamina. John Walker, a well-to-do country gentleman in his early thirties, rode many miles on horseback through England, Wales and Scotland, an...

hobnobpress.co.uk

👇Results from my latest version of desCartes, a hybrid machine learning system for detecting roads on old maps. Its 0.76 IoU score for roads is 31% better than the closest benchmark. 🤯 Preprint forthcoming on arXiv.

The 2025 Richard Deswarte Prize in Digital History celebrates the best of digital history internationally. You have until 30 May to nominate your work or work you love. Please consider doing so. ihrdighist.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2021/12/the-... #dhist

The 2025 Richard Deswarte Prize in Digital History - Digital History Seminar

**SUBMIT HERE BY 30 MAY** Richard Deswarte (1965-2021) was one of the founding convenors of the Digital History seminar at the Institute of Historical Research (IHR), University of London, an advocate...

ihrdighist.blogs.sas.ac.uk

Really enjoyed working on this with Stan Hinton and would love to get some feedback on methods and findings from anyone out there. All criticicsm welcome, this is what WPs are for!

Cambridge Working Papers in Economic and Social History@cwpeconhist.bsky.social · last yr.

❕New WP from @alexislitvine.bsky.social and Stan Hinton❕ 𝐁𝐞𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐬. 𝐀 𝐬𝐮𝐛𝐬𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐬𝐢𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐡𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐨𝐜𝐜𝐮𝐩𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫 𝐫𝐞𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐜 𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐭𝐡

📣New blog post alert! 📣 Who had access to common land in the past, and how extensive were common rights? Our latest blog post by Leigh Shaw-Taylor demonstrates that it was not such an open system as we might assume, even before enclosure... www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/blog #skystorians

@layersoflondon.bsky.social

Tim Hitchcock@timhitchcock.bsky.social · 2y ago

Just clocked @Londonist 's rather wonderful coloured-in version of the area around Clerkenwell, from Rocques' 1746 plan of London. open.substack.com/pub/londonis...

Inventor Alexander Lagerman's beautiful machines in the Matchstick Museum (Tändstickmuseet), Jönköping, including a fairly early (1892) industrial example of non-circular gears. 👌🏻 sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexand...