Funded Research
The WHC has successfully raised external funding for a number of world-historical research initiatives.
The World-Historical Gazetteer
This is a project to create content, standards and digital infrastructure for a World-Historical Gazetteer (WHG). It has two parts. The first is a spatially and temporally comprehensive index of significant world-historical place names (the Spine). The second is a linked data ecosystem, standards, and user tools to support collaborative digital and data-driven historical scholarship at the global scale (the Ecosystem). WHG version 2 (whgazetteer.org) launched in Summer 2021 following three years of development. The World Historical Gazetteer project was initiated in 2017 under a 3-year Preservation and Access grant from the US National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2023, the WHG was awarded a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (DHAG), co-funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
Water in Central Asia
World History Center Director Ruth Mostern, as co-PI along with Dr. Nancy Condee, Director of Pitt's Center for Russian and East European Studies, was awarded a 2018-2021 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to strengthen interdisciplinary connections among Pitt faculty and students across the humanities, social sciences, and pre-professional programs in business and engineering. The focus of the grant is to develop three new undergraduate courses with linked student engagement activities on the theme of Water in Central Asia, to be rolled out sequentially in Spring 2019 through Spring 2020. Learn more about the project here.
In March 2021, the National Humanities Alliance (NHA) released a report that identifies effective strategies for reversing declines in humanities majors and enrollments titled Strategies for Recruiting Students to the Humanities: A Comprehensive Resource. The report features a case study about the Water in Central Eurasia project for elevating the humanities through innovative curriculum. Read more about the report here.
The CHIA Project
The Collaborative for Historical Information and Analysis (CHIA, formed 2011) links academic and research institutions in North America and Europe—with ties to institutions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. CHIA was funded from 2013-2015 through a research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Participants in this grant included the WHC, the School of Information Science (now SCI), Harvard University, Boston University, Michigan State University, and the University of California at Merced.
Dataverse
World-Historical Dataverse serves as the public archive of the CHIA project. Datasets available here were submitted by contributors, retrieved by CHIA staff, or created by linkage of existing datasets. They have been documented systematically according to the CHIA Level 1 standard of documentation. The datasets are curated and preserved permanently according to the practices of Harvard Dataverse.
Mellon History of Science
In 2009, the World History Center partnered with with the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and the University of Pittsburgh Press in a publishing initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The initiative looked to articulate the study of science (and technology) within world history and to identify global perspectives in the history of science. Read more.