September 3, 2024 • 36 mins
Lisa speaks with Ruth Mostern, Professor of History and Director of the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh, to talk about the significance of place and space in the historical understanding of ourselves and our environments.
Through her groundbreaking project, the World Historical Gazetteer, Ruth enables historians and the public alike to visualize and contextualize historical events and relationships geographically, transforming static history into dynamic, place-based storytelling.
Sitting at the intersection of history, geography and technology, this episode is a must-listen for those who believe in the power of place to shape and deepen our understanding of the world.
Ruth Mostern is Professor of History and Director of the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh and Vice President of the World History Association. She is the author of Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern: The Spatial Organization of the Song State, 960-1276 CE (Harvard Asia Center, 2011), and The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History (Yale University Press, 2021), winner of the Joseph Levenson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies in 2022, co-editor of Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana University Press, 2016), and Principal Investigator and Project Director of the World Historical Gazetteer. Ruth received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003 and was Founding Faculty at the University of California, Merced, where she spent 13 years before moving to Pitt in 2017.
Resources:
World Historical Gazetteer: whgazetteer.org
Ruth Mostern at University of Pittsburgh: www.history.pitt.edu/people/ruth-mostern
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Episode Transcript
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(00:08):
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
(00:28):
change in education today,
that is, ordinary people
creating extraordinary impact.
Thank you very much for listening.
In this episode of Educating
(00:49):
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
(01:11):
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
(01:32):
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.
(01:53):
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,
(02:15):
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
(02:37):
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
(02:58):
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
(03:19):
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
(03:40):
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
(04:00):
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
(04:20):
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
(04:41):
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
(05:01):
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,
(05:24):
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
(05:44):
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
(06:06):
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
(06:26):
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.
(06:47):
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
(07:07):
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.
(07:28):
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
(07:50):
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
(08:12):
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
(08:33):
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
(08:55):
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
(09:15):
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,
(09:36):
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
(09:56):
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
(10:18):
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
(10:39):
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
(11:00):
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
(11:20):
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
(11:40):
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
(12:02):
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
(12:24):
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
(12:45):
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
(13:06):
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
(13:26):
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
(13:48):
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
(14:09):
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.
(14:29):
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.
(14:50):
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
(15:12):
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,
(15:33):
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
(15:54):
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
(16:14):
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
(16:36):
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
(16:57):
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
(17:18):
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
(17:40):
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
(18:00):
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
(18:21):
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
(18:42):
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.
(19:03):
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
(19:24):
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
(19:44):
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
(20:05):
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
(20:28):
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
(20:48):
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
(21:08):
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
(21:30):
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.
(21:51):
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
(22:12):
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
(22:34):
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
(22:55):
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
(23:16):
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
(23:37):
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.
(23:57):
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
(24:19):
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,
(24:39):
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.
(25:00):
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
(25:22):
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,
(25:43):
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
(26:04):
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
(26:25):
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.
(26:45):
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
(27:06):
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
(27:28):
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
(27:50):
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
(28:10):
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
(28:30):
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
(28:52):
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
(29:13):
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
(29:33):
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
(29:55):
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
(30:16):
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.
(30:37):
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
(30:58):
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
(31:20):
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
(31:41):
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
(32:02):
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
(32:23):
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?
(32:44):
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
(33:05):
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
(33:26):
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
(33:46):
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
(34:08):
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
(34:29):
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.
(34:50):
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
(35:11):
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.
(35:31):
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
(35:53):
Petrides and produced by
Helene Theros.
Educating to Be Human is recorded
by Nathan Sherman and edited
by Ty Mayer.
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
(00:28):
change in education today,
that is, ordinary people
creating extraordinary impact.
Thank you very much for listening.
In this episode of Educating
(00:49):
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
(01:11):
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
(01:32):
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.
(01:53):
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,
(02:15):
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
(02:37):
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
(02:58):
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
(03:19):
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
(03:40):
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
(04:00):
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
(04:20):
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
(04:41):
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
(05:01):
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,
(05:24):
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
(05:44):
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
(06:06):
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
(06:26):
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.
(06:47):
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
(07:07):
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.
(07:28):
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
(07:50):
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
(08:12):
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
(08:33):
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
(08:55):
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
(09:15):
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,
(09:36):
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
(09:56):
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
(10:18):
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
(10:39):
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
(11:00):
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
(11:20):
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
(11:40):
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
(12:02):
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
(12:24):
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
(12:45):
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
(13:06):
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
(13:26):
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
(13:48):
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
(14:09):
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.
(14:29):
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.
(14:50):
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
(15:12):
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,
(15:33):
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
(15:54):
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
(16:14):
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
(16:36):
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
(16:57):
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
(17:18):
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
(17:40):
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
(18:00):
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
(18:21):
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
(18:42):
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.
(19:03):
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
(19:24):
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
(19:44):
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
(20:05):
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
(20:28):
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
(20:48):
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
(21:08):
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
(21:30):
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.
(21:51):
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
(22:12):
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
(22:34):
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
(22:55):
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
(23:16):
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
(23:37):
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.
(23:57):
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
(24:19):
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,
(24:39):
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.
(25:00):
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
(25:22):
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,
(25:43):
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
(26:04):
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
(26:25):
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.
(26:45):
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
(27:06):
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
(27:28):
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
(27:50):
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
(28:10):
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
(28:30):
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
(28:52):
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
(29:13):
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
(29:33):
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
(29:55):
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
(30:16):
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.
(30:37):
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
(30:58):
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
(31:20):
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
(31:41):
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
(32:02):
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
(32:23):
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?
(32:44):
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
(33:05):
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
(33:26):
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
(33:46):
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
(34:08):
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
(34:29):
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.
(34:50):
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
(35:11):
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.
(35:31):
If you enjoy our show, please
rate your reviews on Apple, Spotify,
or wherever you listen to your
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You can access our show notes for
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And don't forget to follow us on
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Edu to be human, that
is Edu to be human.
This podcast was created by Lisa
(35:53):
Petrides and produced by
Helene Theros.
Educating to Be Human is recorded
by Nathan Sherman and edited
by Ty Mayer.
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