After a year of development, we are pleased to announce the launch of Version 2 of the World Historical Gazetteer (WHG), at whgazetteer.org. The WHG team, led by Technical Director Dr. Karl Grossner, has added new features and made several significant improvements to usability. This work was made possible by the continued support of the project's home institution, the World History Center, and especially by the collaboration and support of the Humanities Cluster of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).
What’s New in Version 2:
- Collections. Link multiple datasets in a collection to logically group and present them. Check out the ‘Dutch History’ collection contributed by our partners at the KNAW Humanities Cluster.
- Improved search. Numerous new options and features.
- Reconciliation to Wikidata: better matches and 3x faster. We improved the matching algorithm to our local index of ~3.5 million Wikidata place records.
- Improved reconciliation review. Track progress of a dataset's reconciliation review tasks in its Browse screen..
- Significantly faster rendering of maps for large datasets and collections
- Improved upload functionality. Validation is now catching and reporting errors more reliably.
This blog post outlines the new features and enhancements in more detail.
The WHG team has also added some new resources to whgazetteer.org. Interested in uploading your data to the WHG? Check out the new tutorial for how to transform a historical, spatial dataset built in Microsoft Excel into the Linked Places delimited file format (LP-TSV) for ingest into the World Historical Gazetteer (WHG).
Want to use the WHG in the classroom? The team behind the World Historical Gazetteer (WHG) has created a sample lesson plan for using the website. This lesson introduces the WHG with a regional focus on Asia.
The World Historical Gazetteer is directed by WHC Director Dr. Ruth Mostern with Digital World History Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Susan Grunewald, and Research Coordinator, Dr. Alexandra Straub serving on the WHG project team. Version 2 would not have been possible without the vision and effort of the WHG Technical Director, Dr. Karl Grossner.