Gazetteers in the digital age
Within academic communities the gazetteer is rapidly emerging as a necessary foundation for meaningful work in the digital humanities and digital history. Over the past several years, historians and archaeologists in particular have pioneered a number of projects aimed at reinventing the gazetteer in the digital age. These include Pleiades (an NEH-sponsored gazetteer of the Greek and Roman world), Pelagios Commons (a Mellon-sponsored linked open data infrastructure), and the China Historical GIS project at Harvard. Each of these projects addresses the needs of a particular field of study but also makes a contribution to the global effort to establish best practices and powerful tools for computer-aided research in the humanities.
