Welcome to Educating to Be Human, a podcast where we'll explore what it means to be human in today's world at the intersection of education, technology and culture. I'm your host, Lisa Petrides. Founder of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management and Education. Each week, I'll speak with people who are supporting transformative change in education today, that is, ordinary people creating extraordinary impact. Thank you very much for listening.
In this episode of Educating to Be Human, I have the pleasure of speaking with Ruth Mostern. She is a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, and she is the director of the World History Center, and she's founder of the World Historical Gazetteer, which we'll talk about today. So it's interesting, if you look up the definition of gazetteer, it says it's a spatially and temporally comprehensive database of significant world historical place names. Now, that's a mouthful.
But in our conversation today, we're going to dive deep into the origins of this project, as well as its desired impact on how we think about ourselves, our histories, and, frankly, our interconnectedness. And what I can tell you is that this is a phenomenally powerful project that Ruth and her team at the University of Pittsburgh and around the world have embarked on. And I'm delighted to welcome Ruth here today to talk about it. So welcome, Ruth.
Thank you. And thank you so much for that kind introduction. I'm so happy to be here. Great. Well, I would love to just start with this idea and this this kind of concept of place and space. I think when we think about what historians do, we don't often go there and think about space. Right? Well, you know, I love the concept of space and place, and those are terms that are really important to geographers, that historians really don't spend as much time talking about.
And what geographers know really well and historians don't focus on is that those are not the same thing, space and place. We think of them, I think, in regular language, as being almost synonymous. But when geographers think of space, they think of everything that happens on the face of the earth. Everything that you can put on a map. And when they think about place, they think about specific named locales that are important to human beings.
And as historians, there's so much that we can leverage with that. Space is a really kind of amorphous concept. But place is where things have been, and that's been such a vital concept for me throughout my career. Can you just explain a little bit about what the role of space plays in this sense of our own sort of personal histories in our everyday lives?
Yeah. So one of my favorite geographers named Doreen Massey has a line that I quote all the time that says, place is the meeting up of histories in space. Right. And this idea that the idea of place leverages events and relationships and important occurrences is really exciting, and it's what allows us to put history on the face of the Earth. Right. Historians are used to asking what happened and what made that happening important.
And the concept of place with this Doreen Massey definition allows us to keep to that work that we do as historians. But then to say, where did this important thing happen? And how did this important thing transform not just the people, but the place on the earth where the event occurred? So one way of thinking about this is that place is human and space is geometry. So if you're looking for a place to meet your friend for dinner and you search on Google Maps and you say, find me a restaurant.
It doesn't say meet your friend at the following, you know x, y coordinate of longitude and latitude. It says, you know, meet your friend at the restaurant and it gives you the name of the restaurant, and it gives you pictures of the restaurant, and it tells you about the food at the restaurant. And that's what it means to say that place is human, while space is just an x y coordinate on the surface of the Earth. I love it. That makes perfect sense.
So tell us, just so we have a good grounding here. I know we're going to really get into this concept of of place and the importance of place, but can you say a little bit, kind of on a high level. What is the World Historical Gazetteer? Just so we have an understanding kind of going into it. What is this thing? So, so we can we can kind of hang our hat on it. Sure. So Gazetteer is, a rare word for something that's really simple. And a gazetteer is any list of place names.
So the index in the back of an atlas is a kind of a gazetteer. And any list of place names can be a gazetteer. And going back hundreds of years, people started in a variety of different cultures to write descriptive gazetteer where you have the name of a place, some information about where it's located, and usually some information about what important people have been there or what important products are produced there. Sometimes some pictures of what happened to them.
And so in the World Historical Gazetteer, we're trying to bring this gazetteer tradition into the computer age. And what we realized early on is that there cannot be one person's gazetteer that is a good gazetteer. And that's for a couple of reasons. One is because there's so many places in the world. Another one of my favorite geographers, named Ifu Twan, has a line and an article of his about gazetteer, where he says the number of places in the world is infinite.
And the reason he says that is because although some places have names, others don't. And he gives the example of, you know, his favorite chair in front of his fireplace, which is a place for him, but not for anyone else.
And if you extend that through all the languages in the world, and you extend it to all of historical time, then there's no such thing as one single gazetteer, because people have different experiences and people have different languages, and also because people fight over the names of places. People don't agree about what a place should be called or about what kind of place it is. Right. Is Agia Sophia right in, in Istanbul? Is that a mosque or is it a church, or is it a Unesco heritage site?
Right. That depends on when and where and to whom you're talking. And so what we do at the World Historical Gazetteer is to say, okay, there's not going to be one single, perfect, comprehensive, authoritative list of place names. And there shouldn't be. I want to understand sort of how you see the relationship between really places and human identity. Place is so important to human identity.
When you meet someone, one of the first questions you ask is you're getting to know them is where are you from? And one of the things that people so often want to do when they're exploring their own selves and their own family histories is to ask, where are our people from? And, some of the most important social movements and political movements in the world, and very much in the world today, are about people's longing for a place, right?
A place that they think that they believed their distant ancestors came from, or a place that their recent ancestors have been expelled from. And it really people are literally living and dying over where they're from, where they want to be, what they want to call the places where they are. And so we were talking a few minutes ago about meeting a friend at a restaurant. And that can end up being really important, right? That might be a place that's really important to you
and your friend. You might have a heavy conversation there. Maybe you fall in love there, but then also, you know, at the social level, entire communities and peoples, live and die over what places they're from and what those places mean to them. That's absolutely true and fascinating, really, to think about it in this way. You know, I'm wondering, as a historian, was there a specific moment or sort of realization that spurred you to undertake this project?
It's been something that I've been working on for a really long time. And as long ago as when I was in graduate school in the 1990s, I started having this feeling as I began my dissertation research, feeling like so many books of histories were kind of floating up in an abstract place. And I would read history books and they would talk about people moving from place to place or some event happening.
And I found myself always wanting to turn to maps and figuring out where that was or trying to just kind of puzzle through. Wait, are we talking about things that were thousands of miles apart? Are we talking about things that were ten miles apart? Right. I couldn't even figure that out in a lot of books of history.
And so I've really spent my whole career with this impulse of thinking that if we can just put people in place, we'll have so much more of an insight about what the human experience is really like. When I was in graduate school in the 1990s, I was working on a dissertation about the history of medieval China. And what I was interested in specifically is something that I call the geography of state power.
And what I realized, because there aren't a lot of sources for medieval China, is that I could make the idea of place into a historical source. And what I mean by that is that there are cases where I didn't have long descriptive documents, but I did have information that a particular county or a particular province or particular prefecture was being established or merged at a particular location and at a particular time. And I started just listing those things.
And I did not know what a gazetteer was, and I didn't even really know anything about computers at that time, databases or spreadsheets, let alone the internet. And so I started just making lists of places, and I started associating those lists of places with when things were happening.
So on such and such a date, the imperial government of the Sung dynasty established such and such a county in such and such a place, and I ended up with a list of 1500 of those instances, and I learned how to put them on maps, and I learned how to put them in databases.
And I realized that I was moving from having a list of places to having a whole story and whole data visualization, about 300 years of history, and how this ancient medieval imperial government had changed around what places in its realm it cared the most about. And that's when I got really excited about the possibility of gazetteer, and about what it's possible to do with lists of place names. So how would a historian in fact put their data or information into the World Historical Gazetteer?
So the way it works is, first, if you're a historian or genealogist or just somebody who cares about place, is that you've created this list of place names, and you can go to the World Historical Gazetteer and find out what our submission format is. And you can even download a template that you can use. It's a really simple spreadsheet format, so you've created your list of place names.
It's in a format, you've registered as a user, and then you can upload your list of place names into our system. At that point, something really interesting happens, and the core of our methodology is something that we call reconciliation and what reconciliation means. I was talking earlier about how places don't have to have just one name, and we don't have to have any one person's perspective on what a place really is. We don't have to think about what the official name is.
And so as you go through our reconciliation process, what happens is a computationally assisted, but absolutely human process where you click through place by place in your submissions and our system says, hey, we think we know about a place that might be a close match to your place. Maybe it's located in the same modern country, maybe it's located nearby. Maybe it has the same name.
Do you or do you not want to say that the place that you've submitted and the place that we already know about are a close match to each other? And if you say yes, then it means that they're linked to each other. Our system uses a methodology called Linked Open Data. And if they're linked together, then if somebody searches for a place, by your name or by a different name that we know about, any kind of variant name, they'll find both of them together. If you say no, this is not a close
match. I'm talking about somewhere totally different, right? If that's your choice, you can always do that. And what that means is that a user who searches for one place won't find the other place together. And so it's partly just simply about saying places are or aren't the same in a simple way.
But it's also a really just, you know, semantically, ethically, politically powerful thing to do where every person who submits a list of places can say, according to them, for them as an author, that they consider places to be similar to one another or distinctive from one another. It is it my understanding also that so not only do we understand sort of in a geospatial way, that this is the same place, but there are also histories
about it. There's stories, there's human interaction, there's politics, there's you're able to see kind of it's more than 3D. It reminds me of those topographical maps where you can see what's underneath the Earth's crust, and then you can go up all these levels. Right. It's almost like being able to see history in this very multi-dimensional way. Is that would that be kind of an accurate description of it? That's absolutely right.
In our system, what we have for each of these submissions, we call them an attestation.
So if I submit a data set that has information about a place and you submit information about a place, and you've said that you want users to find these two places together, then each of us has a version of information about that place that's associated with a particular source, maybe, associated with a particular language, maybe associated with when that place was meaningful or when that place had a certain name. And so we're building up a cluster of information about each place.
And in fact, for any of our place landing pages, if you zoom all the way in, you can often see that people didn't even submit exactly the same coordinates. And so each place is literally a cluster. It's a cluster of points on the map that together add up to a complex and multi vocal idea about what that place is, according to many different people. So it seems to me what this is really getting at, and quite an amazing way, is how this sense of place is really important to humanity.
Right. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that in terms of its importance to humanity, sort of its role in history, in building civilization and maybe even in understanding conflict over time. Absolutely. One example that's on my mind a lot right now, with the war in Gaza, is the way that Israeli and Palestinian people are talking about place and naming place.
And one thing I learned recently is that in 1925, so more than two decades prior to the founding of the State of Israel, there were already Zionist settler groups that had established a place name commission.
So before they had any reason to believe that they would ever be able to establish a government, they already had teams of scholars and historians and settlers and rabbis who were looking at biblical history and who were looking at the names of, you know, exemplary Zionist heroes and looking at maps of Palestine that at that time were populated only with Arabic names. And, you know, you can actually see
the documents. They've been digitized as images, where the early Zionist settlers were crossing out the Arabic names and penciling in the Hebrew names that they wanted to use for the same places. And of course, the consequences of that are reverberating with us today. And there are also now websites of Palestinian historians and Palestinian geographers who are going back to the historical sources and recreating and uplifting the Arabic names for places that have been lost.
And to me, that's not just, of course, it's a story about conflict, and it's a story about how much place and place names and nationalism are linked to each other. But it's also a story about what it's possible to do with computers, where even if Palestinians have lost their homelands, even if their native villages or their native neighborhoods are no longer accessible to them, they are still at least able to reconstruct them in a digital
format. There's a website that people can go back to and teach their kids about places that their ancestors came from, or to know what the words are, to talk about their longing for places that are lost to them. So it really seems like this work is is tied into these larger conversations we're having today in many parts of the world, around cultural heritage and memory and identity. Absolutely. And, that's really what keeps me going in this project is that on the one hand, it's a reference work.
It's something that I believe and hope any library can use to allow people to search for a place by any of its multiple names and find information about books or resources about that place. And I think in the age of computers, it's really exciting to be able to allow for that kind of multifocal and multivalent search.
But in addition to just being a reference work, it's also a platform where people can gain some insight about how places have changed over time and what places are saturated with meaning and conflict, and in some cases, histories of colonialism or displacement and things that might be really hard to talk about, but that we can look at in a really tangible and concrete
way. If we can say, look at this one place, look at all the people who have given it some name because they care so much about it and because it's meaningful to them in their history. And if I think about how I was taught history or world history, you know, as a seventh or eighth grader, I didn't understand any of that kind of context. How amazing now, this could be, to be used in educational settings. Like when I learned world history, we learned dates of wars and dates of settlements.
And, none of the kind of the rich understanding of the the place and the events, that occurred around them. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you envision or how it is being used today in educational settings, and what do you hope, like students and educators can gain from using the World Historical Gazetteer?
So I already use it in my classes, and we already have a page of curricula and lesson plans that are using the site, and I'm really excited about the educational possibilities for it. And one really simple thing that is possible to do in a classroom is to ask students to look at places to follow along, maybe in their history class or in their literature class.
They encounter a place name and they can go to the World Historical Gazetteer, visit the page for that place and learn more about what is complicated and interesting about it, and who has named it, what kinds of things. So that's one really simple use in a classroom. Another tool that we've developed that, you and I haven't talked about yet is something that we call a place collection. And this is designed to be usable for, high school students, maybe even for middle school students.
Easily usable for teachers and for college students. And our place collection tool allows anybody, any registered user, to identify a group of places that have something in common, maybe their battles in a war, or maybe they're places that somebody stopped over the course of their lifetime, places where people lived over the course of their lifetime, or maybe their stops along a pilgrimage route or places associated with an artistic movement.
And we have the option for people to create collections of any of those places according to what they have in common. And it could be as simple as all of the places that are named in one chapter of a history textbook, for instance. And anyone who creates a collection of places can see them viewed together on a map, and can also annotate them with some information a line, a sentence, a couple of sentences, a web link explaining how these places are thematically connected.
Because one thing we haven't talked about yet is that places make so much of their meaning, not as individual places, but as places in combination with one another. And that's another thing that using our tools and our platform - places can be related to each other in many kinds of ways, right? More different kinds of ways then any map or any book can articulate. It might be places that are personally meaningful to you.
It might be places that are on your bucket list of locations that you would like to visit. And so, we're really excited about this idea. We're already using where people can build up personal collections of places, and I can envision so many different kinds of classrooms where that would be really energizing and exciting.
Just the opportunity for people or students and young people to be able to tell their own stories based on place and the events around them, and not have to live, as we've seen in many history books, with with someone else's stories, with their own interpretation of the stories. That's quite an opportunity.
Absolutely. I wish I could see this being used in a writing classroom, for instance, where students are asked to assemble a collection of places that they care about, and then to write a paragraph of annotation about each one and why it's part of their personal collection. And our collection building tool also allows anyone to write an essay, a sort of an introductory essay that says, hey, this is what this whole collection is about. This is what the theme is for it.
And in our version three, which is going to be launching later this month, we also have the opportunity for teachers to establish classroom groups so that students who are asked to do an assignment, especially if it's something very personal like that, don't have to worry that it's going to be visible out on the open internet. It's a safe space where teachers and students can share information with one another.
Using this idea of place as a window into everything that they want to communicate about and reason about. Yeah, I could imagine some, really terrific exchanges, even among classrooms of students in one location and another location as they come to understand, this issue of place in different ways than maybe they're they're being taught. I'm wondering, we have streets being renamed. We have schools being renamed.
I'm wondering if you're encountering resistance at all or in today's world in 2024, where there's a lot of renaming and re understanding of of place, what what we're what you're encountering in that way. Right. That is such a good question. And it's one that I think of a lot in the troubled times that we're living in. And my hope, and maybe it's a utopian hope, is that by allowing people to share on the same page information about what they think a place is, that maybe we don't have to choose
that. It's only one thing. We don't have to choose between an indigenous name and a colonial name. They can exist together side by side in the World Historical Gazetteer. And that even if you know people who want to see places renamed in the name of justice, who may not be successful in the world of maps and street signs and official names, at least can use our platform to say, here's what I think this place should be called. Here's my ancestral name for
it. Here's some information about what it was called 100 or 200 or 500 years ago. My hope is that this can be something that helps to support peace and dialog. That's a lot to hope for. We haven't yet had anyone contact us and say, how dare you use the following name for a place? Or how dare you not include the following other name for a place? And if I did get a communication like that, what I would hope to respond is, you know, add your information too.
Right? The point is to include all of this information together in dialog with somebody submits a list of place names that they want to make public in our index. We do an internal review, not an editorial review, where we say your place names are wrong or we don't like your place names, but just to make sure that it's not something that's, racist, offensive, something that we don't want to have in our
index. But we take a really light editorial touch because our hope is that our platform is a place for dialog on these topics. Let me give you one really specific example, which is that a couple of years ago, the United States Department of the Interior ruled that all the names that still existed as official names on the American map that used a very offensive name for indigenous women, that those names should no longer legally be used.
All of those hundreds of names have been changed to something different. And we indexed the new names, but we're also still keeping the old name because that's also part of history. And in the idea that places are meetings up of history in space, the fact that there are both of those names, the fact that one of those names was founded maybe in the 18th or 19th century and then ceased to be used in the 2020s, is really profound.
We want people to be able to find both those names, and to learn a little bit and get a little bit of context about why those names have co-existed, and why there's a place that might be known by both of those names.
And I have to say, that just seems so important today is we're trying to have a better understanding as people, more compassion, more empathy, sort of trying to understand, I guess, really this nexus of where history meets geography and, and how we help sort of navigate these challenges over time. Because you can't and we should not and we should make clear what other history is. We don't want to erase it. Right.
That the work that you're doing really helps us see that, you know, the places are aren't just locations, they're not just names. It's really the sum of all of those important things that have happened over time. So I really, I really see this as something that helps us understand ourselves better and creates more of a dialog around these topics. Right. I really love the way you put it, that a place is not a location. It's the sum of all of the important things that have happened
at it. And that's really the spirit that I'm trying to bring into my project. Are there ways in which let's say social media, for example, has influenced the way that we study and teach history? And is this an example of sort of moving that forward in a way, or does it create a more complicated conversation that's harder to resolve? That's a great question.
My hope about what is possible to do by moving this conversation about place and history onto the internet and into a linked open data format, is to be able to make things in a way simultaneously more simple and more complicated. And what I mean by that is that rather than having to go to a whole shelf of books, it's possible to go to one website and to one landing page. That's the simple part.
But the complicated part, and I mean complicated in a good way, complexifying, is that once they find their way to that landing page, that they're not finding their way just to one piece of information, or just to what one author of one book thinks about that place, but to a whole world of multi vocal and messy and maybe conflicting information about what has made it meaningful to many people over time.
And that's an aspiration that wouldn't have been possible until quite recently, given the technological affordances of the internet, and especially this data linking methodology that we're using. Great. Well, Ruth, thank you so much for the work, both the work you do as well as for your time today. I really think you've helped us understand and made such a contribution to this way of, you know, how we humans seek to find connection and shared memories.
And I guess that question that we that we ask that we get to know each other by. Where are you from? It means something different to me after I've understood the work of, of the World Historical Gazetteer and the work of historians and geographers and how we put these things together today. Really remarkable work. And thank you so much. Is there a place that we can send people to to learn more about your your project? So the World Historical Gazetteer website is open its
public. Anybody can register as a user. We have lots of information about what Gazetteers are and how to build gazetteer, and how to use all of the tools on our website. And I really encourage anyone who's listening here to come check us out. Great. Thank you so much. Thank you everybody for listening to the show this week. This has been Lisa Petrides with Educating to Be Human. If you enjoy our show, please rate your reviews on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
You can access our show notes for links and information on our guests. And don't forget to follow us on Instagram and Twitter at Edu to be human, that is Edu to be human. This podcast was created by Lisa Petrides and produced by Helene Theros. Educating to Be Human is recorded by Nathan Sherman and edited by Ty Mayer.