Some recent projects

World Historical Gazetteer

World Historical Gazetteer

Role: Technical Director; grant co-author

The World Historical Gazetteer platform aggregates contributed place information drawn from historical sources (names, types, locations, relations, etc.), adding temporal depth to its initial 1.8m record core dataset of modern authority records.

Registered users can upload project place data to a private workspace, reconcile their records with Getty TGN and Wikidata, download results and/or publish them as linked data, then submit augmented datasets for accessioning to the WHG "union index."

Linked Places format

Linked Places format

In 2019, I led a small working group* in developing Linked Places format specifically for contributions to World Historical Gazetteer and to the Pelagios gazetteer data store underlying their Recogito tool.

The distinctive features of Linked Places format include:

  • It is valid JSON-LD (an RDF syntax)
  • It is valid GeoJSON
  • Extends GeoJSON with "when" objects, permitting temporal scoping of names, types, geometries, and relations

* including Rainer Simon and Graham Klyne

Linked Paths (and GeoJSON-T)

Linked Paths (and GeoJSON-T)

Role: coordinating co-author and developer

Under a 2016 micro-grant from the Pelagios proect, I joined with Lex Berman and Rainer Simon in developing GeoJSON-T, a temporal extension to the GeoJSON data format commonly used in web mapping applications. I then developed Linked Paths as a pilot application to test its implementation for three types of geographic movement data: journeys, routes, and flows.

GeoJSON-T remains an active project, and was the basis for the Linked Places format developed with Rainer SImon in 2019 for World Historical Gazetteer.

Authorial London

Authorial London

Role: co-investigator and lead developer

The Authorial London project is compiling and mapping references to places within London found in works by writers who have lived there.

It has been developed as the first instance of a re-usable platform we call, “Authorial {X}.“ Our intent is that researchers and college instructors may readily instantiate a similar site for any place of interest, and engage either a class or research community of interest in gathering data for it.

Çatalhöyük Living Archive

Çatalhöyük Living Archive

Role: co-investigator and lead developer

Çatalhöyük Living Archive is an experimental web application representing data from 21 years of excavation and analysis at that Neolithic settlement southeast of Konya on the Anatolian Plateau in present-day Turkey.

The project's over-arching goal is the reorganization and open publication of all Çatalhöyük data so it can be more readily re-interpreted, now and beyond the period of active excavation ending in 2016

City Nature

City Nature

Role: co-investigator and lead developer

Nature is unevenly distributed in and across cities despite the fact that much else about cities scales with population. The City Nature project combined spatial analysis of parks and other natural areas in cities with text mining of planning documents and published historical narratives to explore why.

ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network of the Roman Empire

ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network of the Roman Empire

Role: v1 site design; web & database developer

By simulating movement along the principal routes of the Roman road network, the main navigable rivers, and hundreds of sea routes in the Mediterranean, Black Sea and coastal Atlantic, this interactive model reconstructs the duration and financial cost of travel in antiquity