A new Pitt center will weave history and place to build a comprehensive global atlas

The University of Pittsburgh will soon be home to a new research center that will challenge the notion of history as a single past, using massive amounts of data and voices that are often left out of textbooks to explore places around the world across time and contexts.

Directed by Ruth Mostern, professor of history in Pitt’s Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of Spatial History Innovation (ISHI) will be the first of its kind. It is set to launch in July.

“I always tell my students: History is about change over time,” said Mostern. Geography, on the other hand, looks at changes through space. Along with Alexandra Straub, assistant director at the World History Center and associate director at ISHI, Mostern is bringing the two perspectives together in a platform that aims to house a comprehensive history of global cultures and societies.

That platform is ISHI’s foundational project, the World Historical Gazetteer, an interactive database that links historical records about places through time. An entry for one location, for example, will also list its previous names and provide links to external sources that offer information about past inhabitants or a catalogue of local flora and fauna.  

“If someone searches for Mount McKinley, for instance, they should know that it has another name, and that there’s a whole other tradition associated with that place,” said Mostern, who has been managing the database for eight years. In this case, a curious searcher would find the peak is also known to Alaskan Native communities as Denali, from the Koyukon language.

This is the kind of information that the Gazetteer has for about 2 million places around the globe, a number that is constantly expanding as community members contribute additional datasets. 

In order to connect so many different kinds of information, spatial history relies on experts in fields from art to environmental engineering, and Mostern is always looking for collaborators who can add to the Gazetteer’s vast library of information. The team is working on rebuilding the database’s architecture so it can handle larger amounts of data and make use of new technologies, including large language models.

Mostern is adamant that the World History Gazetteer will remain free and open source. The platform is already open to schools, genealogists and the public to use like Google Maps, traveling through time and space.

She hopes that one day an amateur genealogist trying to find an ancestor’s birthplace using a 200-year-old birth certificate could head to the Gazetteer and feel confident that they could find information about where that place is now and what happened there during the past two centuries.

“All of this is in service of a vision,” Mostern said. “How transformative it could be if we could reason about where we sit on the Earth’s surface today in terms of all the richness, and the struggle and the history that place had.”