The World Historical Gazetteer at Scale | Ruth Mostern | AI and History Conference 2026

Ruth Mostern (University of Pittsburgh) on the World Historical Gazetteer, linked data for historical places and AI-assisted matching, at the AI and History Conference 2026. Ruth Mostern directs the World Historical Gazetteer (WHG), open digital infrastructure that links historical places across languages and time periods through reconciled records and phonetic search, and the Institute for Spatial History Innovation (ISHI) at the University of Pittsburgh. She argues that place is a contested, changing object that gazetteers can model and maps cannot, then describes how the WHG reconciles records against Wikidata and GeoNames, holds 2.2 million places in its public version and about 47 million in a development version, and what funding and staffing keep it running. She also reports an experiment that ran headwords from an 1857 gazetteer through the WHG application programming interface (API) and found the results largely wrong for Asia. Speaker: Ruth Mostern, University of Pittsburgh. 0:00 Welcome and the plan for the session 2:24 Why place is contested: John Agnew's definition of a locale 4:25 Placemaking events: renamings and contested borders 9:25 Gazetteers versus maps: a data model for place 12:41 The World Historical Gazetteer links gazetteers into one index 15:44 What it takes institutionally: ISHI and hard-money funding 18:59 Searching the index: Lublin and phonetic matching 25:15 Contributed data sets and name changes, including replacement names 30:06 Linked data in the age of AI 33:50 Scaling toward 47 million places with semantic clustering 38:14 Experiment: running an 1857 gazetteer through the API 44:59 Questions on colonial bias and licensing Talk page: https://proflouishyman.github.io/ai_c... Conference program: https://proflouishyman.github.io/ai_c... All talks:    • AI and History Conference 2026   Recorded at the AI and History Conference 2026, Johns Hopkins University (SNF Agora Institute), in partnership with the American Historical Association. Hosted by the Center for Economy and Society. #DigitalHistory #AIandHistory #HistoryAndAI #Gazetteer #HistoricalGIS