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A digital gazetteer records information associated with specific places. This lesson teaches you how to create a gazetteer from a historical text, using the Linked Places Delimited (LP-TSV) format.

Ruth Mostern is Director of the World History Center and Professor, Department of History, University of Pittsburgh.
Prof. Dr. Ruth Mostern is a specialist in spatial and environmental history focusing on imperial China and the world. An interdisciplinary scholar with research interests bridging the humanities, social sciences, information science and environmental science, she has authored one book and edited another and has completed two major digital publications and eighteen articles. She has raised approximately $1.8 million in extramural funding and currently holds grants from both the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation.
Mostern's current research reconstructs the environmental history of the Yellow River as a human and natural system. She is studying the entire river basin (which stretches from the Tibetan plateau to the Pacific Ocean) during a timeframe of approximately 5,000 years in order to assess when, and to what degree, human activity in the upper and middle reaches of the river increased the risk of flooding on the densely populated lower course of the river. She is creating a digital atlas that includes a GIS (a digital mapping system) and database of the dates and locations of disasters and civil engineering works in the river basin. This data-rich atlas will support interdisciplinary advances in the understanding of large-scale human-environmental impact.
Mostern is also Principal Investigator of a collaborative initiative, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, to create a World-Historical Gazetteer that includes content and infrastructure for spatial linked open data to permit large-scale and long-term historical analysis and visualization.

Professor

CCBY 4.0

Working with Named Places: How and Why to Build a Gazetteer

Training module

Researchers often need to be able to search a corpus of texts for a defined list of terms and historians are often interested in certain places named in a text or texts. This lesson details how to programmatically search documents for a list of terms, including place names and then how to obtain coordinates and map historical place names with the World Historical Gazetteer.

Susan Grunewald

Working with Named Places: How and Why to Build a Gazetteer

Finding Places in Text with the World Historical Gazetteer

Susan Grunewald

Resources

Working with Named Places: How and Why to Build a Gazetteer

Finding Places in Text with the World Historical Gazetteer