Saturday, January 17, 2026

PeriodO: A gazetteer of period definitions for linking and visualizing data

[First listed in AWOL 6 June 2016, updated 17 January, 2026]

PeriodO: A gazetteer of period assertions for linking and visualizing data

What is this?

PeriodO is a public domain gazetteer of scholarly definitions of historical, art-historical, and archaeological periods. It eases the task of linking among datasets that define periods differently. It also helps scholars and students see where period definitions overlap or diverge.

Who are you?

The PeriodO project is led by Adam Rabinowitz (University of Texas at Austin) and Ryan Shaw (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). Patrick Golden is the lead developer of the PeriodO software. The PeriodO dataset has been developed largely by our generous contributors. Our work has been funded by a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant from the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a National Digital Platform grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Tell me more.

Start by looking at the guide to using PeriodO.

You may also be interested in reading about the motivation for the project or getting a technical overview. Further information can be found in our publications. Or contact us and ask whatever you want

Heritage Gazetteer of Libya

 [First posted in AWOL 18 April 2019, updated 17 January 2026]

Heritage Gazetteer of Libya

http://www.slsgazetteer.org/static/images/header.jpg
Welcome to the Heritage Gazetteer of Libya, which is being developed by members of the Society for Libyan Studies, working with King's Digital Laboratory. Our aim is to record, and to provide with unique identifiers, locations and monuments within modern Libya which are of significance to the history of the area up to 1950; we are offering as many variant names as possible, together with geodata from various sources. The resultant identifiers (URI) can be read by a computer, and used by anyone recording heritage materials online. We hope that this resource will be useful for everyone interested in studying, or recording, the history of the country.

iDAI.gazetteer

 [First posted in AWOL 22 May 2017, updated 17 January 2026]

iDAI.gazetteer 

Deutsches Archäologisches Institut

Der iDAI.gazetteer ist ein Werkzeug, um die Ortsdaten-Struktur innerhalb des DAI sukzessive zu optimieren, d. h. sowohl die Zahl der mit Ortsdaten versehenen Informationsobjekte zu erhöhen, diese dann in die weltweiten Ortsdatensysteme einzubinden, und auch die im DAI schon vorhandenen Informationsobjekte mit Ortsdaten zu vereinheitlichen. Der iDAI.gazetteer ist somit der Auftakt zu einem großen, neuen Querschnitts-Arbeitsfeld.

Geodaten sind ein hinreichend vereinbarungsfähiges, aber auch umfassend genug anwendbares Kontextualisierungskriterium. Ihre Bedeutung für die Kontextualisierung nimmt zu, wenn über die bidirektionale Verknüpfung hinaus eine Drei- oder Vielecksverknküpfung zustande kommt.

Daher ist der iDAI.gazetteer u. a. auch eine Kontextualisierungsmaschine, die ortsbasierte Suchen über mehrere Informationssysteme hinweg erlaubt, etwa über iDAI.objects und iDAI.bibliography.

The Syriac Gazetteer

 [First posted in AWOL 15 September 2015, updated 17 January 2026]

The Syriac Gazetteer

The Syriac Gazetteer is a geographical reference work of Syriaca.org for places relevant to Syriac studies. It is growing from an initial publication of over two thousand place records.

  • Index page: an alphabetic index of places in the gazetteer.
  • About page: an overview of the gazetteer and its contributors.
  • Help page: documentation, editorial guidelines, and technical definitions.
  • Browse maps: browse places on an interactive map.
  • Edessa: featured place.

learn more »

How to cite this database:

Notes: David A. Michelson, William L. Potter, and Daniel L. Schwartz, general editors. The Syriac Gazetteer, 2nd ed. (Syriaca.org: The Syriac Reference Portal, 2019-), http://syriaca.org/geo

Bibliography: Michelson, David. A., William L. Potter, and Daniel L. Schwartz, general editors. The Syriac Gazetteer. 2nd ed. Syriaca.org: The Syriac Reference Portal, 2019-. http://syriaca.org/geo

 


Friday, January 16, 2026

Heritage Gazetteer of Cyprus

 [First posted in AWOL 5 December 2017, updated 16 January 2026]

Heritage Gazetteer of Cyprus

Welcome to the Heritage Gazetteer for Cyprus (HGC). Cyprus has played an important role in the history of many cultures. It has been described in many languages and several different alphabets, over several millennia. This can make identification of places difficult; and it means that interesting historical information may be dispersed, and hard to access.

The overall aim of this project, therefore, is to facilitate the use of a wide range of expertise in recording the historic geography of Cyprus; the resource has been designed to record all locations/monuments attested as in use in any period up to 1882, and all names used for these locations on the island, in any language or period up to the establishment of standard reference systems. Modern administrative districts are named according to the Οδηγός Τυποποίησης Ονομάτων (Nicosia, 2007, available online). Modern toponyms are given in the form used in the Complete Gazetteer of Cyprus (Nicosia, 1987, pp 1-1301 available online: see also the list of Towns and Villages of Cyprus, pp. 1303-1669).

The essential requirement for inclusion in the HGC is, for any location not yet in the Gazetteer, a georeference, a name and a dated reference; and for any name not yet in the Gazetteer, a reference to an example of its use in an accessible document, and a date. There is provision for contributors to register, and for all contributions to be peer-reviewed before publication.

Kima Historical Gazetteer: Place Names in the Hebrew Script

 [First posted in AWOL 5 December 2017, updated 16 January 2026]

 Kima Historical Gazetteer: Place Names in the Hebrew Script

The Pelagios Resource Development Grant of the first round has enabled us to launch the project Kima, a Hebrew script, attestation-based historical gazetteer. The resulting resource was a promising database, which was, however, still unbalanced and required more work in order to make it usable as an encompassing, multipurpose gazetteer. We were thrilled, then, to hear that our application for the second round was successful.
The second RDG will enable us not only to consolidate the gazetteer with data entry through OCR and OCR correction of two large print gazetteers, and of the annotation, using Recogito, of the place names in two bilingual editions of medieval travel narratives. Furthermore, more than a rich resource in the Hebrew script, it will enable us to offer  a scalable contribution to any gazetteer and extention to Recogito by developing work flows for gazetteer building through Recogito.  We will expand here on three aspects of the work: populating the gazetteer, matching and geocoding, and finally, opening and sustaining the gazetteer.

 

The Archaeological Gazetteer of Iran: An Online Encyclopedia of Iranian Archaeological Site

[First posted in AWOL 22 March 2021, updated 16 January 2026] 
 
Iran is one of the major constituent regions of the ancient world, located in southwest Asia, between the Indus and the Tigris rivers. It is bounded to the north by the Central Asian steppes, the Caspian Sea, and the mountains of Caucasus; to the west by the Anatolian Plateau and the plains of Mesopotamia; to the south by the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman; and to the east by present-day countries of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Iran is estimated to have over 300,000 archaeological sites, dating from the Old Stone Age to medieval times. These sites range from prehistoric caves, shelters, and campsites to highly complex monuments and cities. The archaeological exploration of the country began as early as the seventeenth century and led to the formation of archaeological institutions and the creation of Iranian archaeology disciplines and curricula in Iran, Europe, and North America.