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

✉️ 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...

(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...

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?

🌍 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.

🪄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....

🧭 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...

🌍 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...

👇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

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!

📣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

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...

Even when the Bayeux Museum closes for renovations in September, you can access the Tapestry online here. A treat for #Skystorians

Today I'm launching #liiive: a new IIIF viewer that puts real-time collaboration front and center. View, annotate, and discuss together as if you're in the same room. Just paste a manifest URL and go! liiive.now 🎄 #DigitalHumanities #IIIF #DH #ArtHistory #Museums

I don't see many long threads on here, but I'll try one - it's about Holbein's Ambassadors, his 1533 masterpiece in the National Gallery. It's often presented as a great mystery, but I think once we understand the circumstances in which it was made, its meaning becomes clearer. 1/

Excited to have received funding from @ukri.org AHRC and @dfgpublic.bsky.social to work with Werner Scheltjens at Univ. Bamberg for our project Unlocking Upcycled Medieval Data: North Sea Networks, People, and Commodities in the London Customs Accounts 1380-1560'

For every noble or gentleman who did the 'Grand Tour', there was one or more servants who did it with them, but these men and women have been mostly invisible and unheard. @richardjansell.bsky.social's new edition finally gives us access to their perspectives and their #WrittenWorlds!

Attended a IHR/People, Place and Community @chppc.bsky.social seminar. Intrigued about the National Archives project on Ravenser Odd, a community that rose from the sea in the c13th century in mouth of River Humber, and then lost again. #CoastalHistory beta.nationalarchives.gov.uk/explore-the-...

Age yourself with your first #computer 1977, TRS-80 🤯 The "80" made it sound ever so futuristic, though that referred to its 8-bit processor. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80

A fresh reminder/plea, as this place has grown quite a bit since my last, er, autotrombation. The website now has a couple of dozen more articles. Please spread the word.

One for you, @clha.bsky.social?

Hello! We are over here now. Come and explore our more than 400 historic maps of London available to view on our website. Which is your favourite? layersoflondon.org/map?layers=t... #Maps #GIS #HGIS #SpatialHumanities #DigitalHumanities #GeoHumanities #StoryMaps #MapMonday

The library is a rich resource for anyone researching British and Irish #localhistory. But we also have local history holdings in many other collections, including Germany, Latin America, Italy and US States to name a few. Browse the library pages to find out more www.history.ac.uk/library-digi...

Given current events, this seems to be the right time for us, Pelagios, to be joining bluer skies. Who are we? We are a free and open association of equal and interdependent Partners from the digital humanities, GLAM sector, and data science field, working to make linking data online really easy.

Building on foundations laid by @kgeographer.bsky.social, we're constantly looking for ways to cement @whgazetteer.org in the #DH ecosystem. Ideas and followers welcome!

Do you know of this bundle, @judyzara.bsky.social ?

I have just put up a design spec for a "Linked Data" sidebar portlet I hope we can add to #PleiadesGazetteer place pages before the winter break. github.com/isawnyu/plei... Comments and suggestions are welcome on the ticket on GitHub. Boost as you will. #DH #gazetteers #LinkedData

Viabundus 1.3 ("St. Gertrud") is online! The most notable new feature is, that you can include stations to your route, so you can better follow itineraries in your sources.

Help, please? I'm trying to date a ledger by its watermarks and ruled lines (see attached). Does anyone here know how the Villedary marks changed over their long period of production?

I've finally got round to publishing the geolocated transcripts I made of several Elizabethan Coastal Surveys (1565). Primarily for "suppressing pirates and other disorders" and for Customs regulation, they include details of local populations and vessels. github.com/docuracy/Eli...