Historical Gazetteers

Ruth Mostern (University of Pittsburgh)

This video discusses historical gazetteers, essentially any databases of place names. Gazetteers are useful for spatial analysis, especially in the context of history, when the data is largely unstructured text. The video describes how to build a database from structured texts that discuss space and then ask historical questions of the sources. It also explains how a database of places can then be turned into a relational database that also links descriptions of events to the places in turn to create timelines.

Further Reading and Resources

Humphrey Southall, Ruth Mostern and Merrrick Lex Berman, “On Historical Gazetteers,” International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 5.2 (2011), 127-145.
Merrick Lex Berman, Ruth Mostern and Humphrey Southalol, eds., Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana University Press, 2016).
World Historical Gazetteer.

July 3, 2019. Digital History, HGIS, Digital Editions

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Ruth Mostern (University of Pittsburgh)

Ruth Mostern is Associate Professor of History and Director of the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a Chinese historian and world historian with specialties in spatial, digital, and environmental methods. She is the author of Dividing the realm in Order to Govern: The Spatial Organization of the Song State (960-1276 CE) (Harvard, 2011) and the forthcoming Following the Tracks of Yu: The Imperial and Ecological Worlds of the Yellow River (Yale, 2020). She is also the co-editor of Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana, 2016) and she is the P.I of the World Historical Gazetteer.