By MARTY LEVINE
You could read a timeline of the life of Olaudah Equiano — also known as Gustavus Vassa — who was kidnapped from Benin in 1753, enslaved by a British naval officer, learned to sail, bought his freedom and worked on ships all over the world, not only as a sailor but also as a laboratory assistant trying to turn seawater drinkable and a hairdresser, all while campaigning for slavery’s abolition.
You could even read Vassa’s own account of his life, published in 1789.
But one glance at the map on the World Historical Gazetteer of the 70-plus places Vassa lived and worked — from Portugal to Philadelphia, the Arctic to Honduras — and you can understand the power of visualizing place to create immediate interest in Vassa’s story.
The Gazetteer — begun with a 2016 National Endowment for the Humanities grant to Pitt’s World History Center, headed by history faculty member Ruth Mostern, and aided by current NEH funding — is aimed at helping both faculty and laymen turn worldwide place data into new visualizations.
Now it is set to roll out version 3.0, with improved capabilities and navigation, including more context for images and “time sliders” to toggle among images from different eras. Its teaching pages, where instructors work on creating and gathering classroom materials, will soon let individual teachers and workshop leaders establish their own place collections and assign students to contribute to them. Next month, the Gazetteer team is holding a series of public meetings online to introduce the improvements and help plan its future moves.
Places — spaces big and small where humans live — have complex, evolving histories: Jerusalem has had 96 names throughout history, for instance, and whether Istanbul or Constantinople is the proper moniker remains contentious between the Turks and Greeks. The Gazetteer aids people in using existing databases or creating new ones to figure out and chart such evolutions — not only in names but in every aspect of life on each inhabited spot on Earth.
Mostern sees the site’s place collections as an aid to storytelling, “for anyone who wants to tell a place-based story” — which would seem to be most stories, at least in part. The site allows for users to put multiple places together to create meaning for a life, as in the account of Gustavus Vassa. Mostern has taught Vassa’s story through books and other documents for years but bringing together databases inside the World Historical Gazetteer has helped make more sense of his journey in her lessons, she says. The map of his life lets students better see what his world looked like.
“Gazetteer” is a 500-year-old term for any index of place names (such as the list at the end of an atlas); the Centennial Gazetteer of the United States, published in 1876 of course, has a verbal snapshot of Pittsburgh’s people and industries in that year, for instance. The World Historical Gazetteer is designed to “bring these kinds of rich, encyclopedic historical ways of thinking about places together with ways of thinking about places in the computer age,” Mostern says. The idea is not to create another written encyclopedia entry but instead “associating open databases across the Internet.”
The results can be as simple as a spreadsheet or map or a more complex linking of a place’s different names, boundaries and inhabitants to create a new visual representation of life in a single location.
So far, the Gazetteer links to 2 million records on the entire world — which just scratches the surface, Mostern says. Users submit databases and the World Historical Gazetteer team — in and outside of Pitt — vets them. The site has an editorial manager, and users can flag perceived issues with any data, but the Gazetteer plans to add a peer-review process in the future. “We hope to grow to a size where we’re going to need to ramp up the editorial structure,” she says.
The site team is also helping users develop teaching tools and working with teachers to put together classroom resources, mostly for high schools so far.
At the four public sessions on Sept. 7 and 8, the Gazetteer team is asking for “help in identifying and prioritizing next steps in making the WHG platform more useful and more usable for more people.” (Click on the desired date and time to register: 9-10 a.m. Sept. 7 ; 4-5 p.m. Sept. 7; 9-10 a.m. Sept. 8; and 4-5 p.m. Sept. 8.)
Given the Gazetteer’s facility for gathering centuries of data across many cultures and languages, Mostern adds, “for me, this is a project that has diversity at its center, that has social justice at its center.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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