Stephen Gadd
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docuracy.co.uk
Stephen Gadd
@docuracy.co.uk
640 followers 180 following 80 posts
Assistant Research Professor @camunicampop.bsky.social
Technical Director, World Historical Gazetteer @whgazetteer.org
Research Associate & GIS Consultant @ihr.bsky.social & @layersoflondon.bsky.social
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Reposted by Stephen Gadd
kgeographer.bsky.social
🧵 The Environmental Dimensions of Place Service (EDOPS) v0.4 is live: edops.computingplace.org

Give it a place (settlement, historical polity) & get a structured "environmental signature" of the drainage basin(s) it occupies: hydrology, climate, terrain, etc. + climate & land use over time

1/3
Home page of the Environmental Dimensions of Place Service (EDOPS), with links to its 3 principal pages, Sandbox, Workbench, Data Explorer
September 10, 2026 at 3:12 PM
Reposted by Stephen Gadd
whgazetteer.org
Inspired by @sharonhoward.bsky.social's beautiful mapping of @thegozfather.bsky.social's catalogue of pleadings in the Court of Requests, we're building a new Workbench tool to help identify place names from the descriptions.

worldhistoricalgazetteer.github.io/workbench-de...
Heatmap of England and Wales showing the density of places identified (or misidentified) from the TNA descriptions of its Elizabethan-period pleadings in the Court of Requests. Map popup showing detail of a case relating to Spon Street, Coventry, and a link to the record in the TNA online catalogue.
August 28, 2026 at 3:52 PM
Reposted by Stephen Gadd
whgazetteer.org
Trying something new: feeding old print gazetteers through modern OCR + open LLMs + our newly-expanded index to see how much can be turned into searchable, mappable data. Read more at blog.whgazetteer.org?p=434

Play with it: worldhistoricalgazetteer.github.io/gazetteer-of...
Global heatmap of the roughly 116,000 places extracted from A Gazetteer of the World (1856), plotted on a world basemap. Density is highest across Britain and Europe, South Asia, and the eastern United States; sparser across much of Africa, South America, and the interior of Asia, reflecting the 1856 compilers' Anglocentric reach.
June 1, 2026 at 8:43 AM
Reposted by Stephen Gadd
whgazetteer.org
🕵️We're transcribing and geocoding all 7 volumes of "A Gazetteer of the World" (1856), a monumental work edited anonymously by "a Member of the Royal Geographical Society" @rgs.org - can anyone suggest who that might have been, and why they might not have been named?

archive.org/details/agaz...
May 22, 2026 at 5:29 PM
docuracy.co.uk
Companion to the Datini Letters map: a new Voyages explorer for the Melis archive. 3,393 Mediterranean ship records (1379–1492). Arcs coloured by predominant vessel type per route. Ports geocoded via @whgazetteer.org.

docuracy.github.io/datini/viagg...

#DigitalHumanities #DH #MedievalMed
Map of the Mediterranean and adjacent waters on a dark basemap, showing 3,393 ship voyages from the Melis archive (1379–1492) as curved arcs between origin and destination ports. Arc colour encodes the predominant vessel type on each route: red for galleys (galea, galeotta, fusta, saettia), purple for cogs and carracks, gold for general sailing ships (nave, navetta, panfilo), teal for Mediterranean coastal traders (liuto, rampino, vacchetta), magenta for brigantines and pinnaces, sky-blue for boats and small craft, muted purple for unspecified types. Arc width scales to voyage count per route. The densest threads cluster across the western Mediterranean between Italy, Catalonia and the Balearics, with prominent reaches out to North Africa, the Aegean, the English Channel and the Atlantic. A left-hand sidebar lists filters — dated-only toggle, year range, vessel-type chips colour-matched to the map — and a legend giving each category's example types. Screenshot from the Datini Voyages map in Travel Time mode, zoomed on the north-western Mediterranean. A curved green-yellow arc connects Pisa on the Tuscan coast to Aigues-Mortes on the French Languedoc coast, with both ports drawn as small blue circular markers. The arc's colour places this route on the duration gradient at roughly 14 days — between the cyan (0–5 days, fast) and magenta (60+ days, slow) extremes shown in the sidebar legend. A popup over the arc reads "Pisa → Aigues Mortes": 10 voyages recorded, average 14 days from 1 dated voyage, years 1386–1402, top vessel type "nave" (ship). The left sidebar mirrors these numbers in the Selected Feature panel and lists each individual voyage with its date range, duration and ship type below.
May 19, 2026 at 6:14 PM
docuracy.co.uk
🔔 A heavy church bell meant a heavy cart and a way capable of bearing it. Can the spread of bells >5cwt from their foundries serve as a proxy for pre-modern wheeled-transport networks, at least where navigable waterways can be ruled out? 1/5

#HistoricalGIS #EconomicHistory #TransportHistory
May 10, 2026 at 10:06 AM
Reposted by Stephen Gadd
camhistory.bsky.social
How @camunicampop.bsky.social researchers are turning static snapshots of Victorian Britain into dynamic life histories.

The team are linking over 200 million census records, revealing how people moved, worked and lived in ways never before possible.

🔎 Read on 👉 www.hist.cam.ac.uk/news/tracing...
How researchers are linking over 200 million census records to transform historical research
May 5, 2026 at 9:39 AM
docuracy.co.uk
New in the Datini Letters explorer: click any city to focus on its correspondence routes. Shareable links capture the full state of the view.
docuracy.github.io/datini/#mode...

#MedievalSky #DigitalHumanities
Screenshot of the Datini Letters Geospatial Explorer in Travel Time mode, focused on Avignon. A dark map of the western Mediterranean shows curved arcs fanning out from Avignon, coloured on a cyan-to-magenta scale by average letter delivery time: short hops to nearby French and Catalan cities run cyan and green, while longer routes across the sea or to Italian fondacos shade through yellow and red. A popup over Avignon lists letters sent and received, country, active years and top correspondents.
May 4, 2026 at 6:44 AM
docuracy.co.uk
✉️ Explore 145,000 medieval merchant letters as a live map: the correspondence network of Francesco di Marco Datini (c.1363–1412), spanning Florence to Barcelona to North Africa.
Visualise routes, travel times & seasonality.
docuracy.github.io/datini/

#DigitalHumanities #MedievalHistory
A dark-themed interactive map of the medieval western Mediterranean showing 14th-century merchant letter routes as curved arcs coloured from cyan (fast, 0–5 days) through yellow to red (30+ days). Short land routes between Tuscan cities glow cyan; longer sea routes to Barcelona and Majorca burn orange and red, revealing the unpredictability of medieval maritime travel. (299 characters) Long (accessible description for screen readers / figure caption): Screenshot of the Datini Letters Geospatial Explorer in Travel Time mode. A dark basemap of the western Mediterranean is overlaid with curved arc lines connecting pairs of cities in the Datini merchant network. Arc colour encodes average letter delivery time on a gradient from cyan (near-instant, 0–5 days) through green and yellow (one to two weeks) to orange and deep red-magenta (more than 30 days). Dense clusters of fast cyan arcs radiate from Florence and Pisa across Tuscany, reflecting the reliable day-or-two land post. Arcs reaching westward to Barcelona, Valencia, and Palma de Majorca shift to orange and red, capturing the slower and far more variable sea routes that could take anywhere from a week to several months. City nodes are shown as circles: pink for the main Datini fondacos (Pisa, Florence, Barcelona, Genoa, Valencia, Majorca) and blue for correspondent cities. A sidebar on the left shows the Travel Time mode is selected, with a cyan-to-red colour legend and a filter slider for minimum letters per route.
May 1, 2026 at 3:51 PM
docuracy.co.uk
Medieval Markets & Fairs in England & Wales: remember the excellent dataset published back in 2003? I've given it a snazzy new interface, incorporating various updates which were made following publication.

Separately, I'm working on extending it to 1846...

ihr-digital.github.io/markets-and-...
Image showing the new interface for the 2003 Medieval Markets & Fairs dataset.
March 11, 2026 at 1:07 PM
docuracy.co.uk
Fun piece by @justincolson.bsky.social and Werner Scheltjens.

My job on this project is to turn messy medieval records into a tidy database so that my colleagues can more easily spot trends in fashion, industry, and commercial networks.

theconversation.com/medieval-lon...
Medieval Londoners’ cheaply imported mass-produced Christmas gifts look surprisingly familiar
We often imagine medieval life as dull, dirty and short, with little in the way of material comfort or decoration. However, medieval Londoners were importing toys, treats and trinkets by the boatload ...
theconversation.com
December 19, 2025 at 5:34 PM
Reposted by Stephen Gadd
palaeofuturist.bsky.social
(4) Linking Knowledge Through Place: ISHI, WHG, and the Future of Gazetteer Collaboration, with @rmostern.bsky.social @docuracy.co.uk, Alexandra Loranna, Palak Vashist. Look at Institute for Spatial History Innovation & World Historical Gazetteer. Register to participate at forms.gle/dzSq2GibT17n...
Linking Knowledge Through Place: ISHI, WHG, and the Future of Gazetteer Collaboration
Description: This activity focuses on advancing collaborative methods for historical place alignment across gazetteers and related datasets within the Pelagios community. It brings together members of...
forms.gle
November 11, 2025 at 4:21 PM
Reposted by Stephen Gadd
palaeofuturist.bsky.social
Linked Pasts 11 programme (December 1–5 and some 8–12)

linkedpasts.hcommons.org/2025/11/09/l...
linkedpasts.hcommons.org
November 10, 2025 at 7:57 PM
Reposted by Stephen Gadd
trixiegadd.bsky.social
This week's fungi for #FungiFriday.
Death cap and false death cap, red and orange fly agaric, lawyer's wig, penny bun and blusher.
October 3, 2025 at 5:03 PM
Reposted by Stephen Gadd
tyguson.bsky.social
Today I start my research trip sailing down the River Seine from Paris to Honfleur (via a few stops) in a reconstruction of the Klåstad cargo ship built in 998. It’s the penultimate stage in the ship’s journey from Rome to London throughout the summer. I’ll post updates as we go #Saga25 #MedievalSky
August 2, 2025 at 5:19 AM
docuracy.co.uk
Hours of fun spent realigning my foolishly London-centric assumptions about medieval European trading networks. Shetland, for example, was far from peripheral: a non-Mercator map-projection helps.

I've rebuilt the journey-timed, square-rigged sailing algorithm for docuracy.github.io/Historical_S...
Map of northern and western Europe showing computed square-rigged sailing routes between the Baltic Sea and Spain. Outward journeys curve northwest via Shetland and the North Atlantic, while return journeys favour the English Channel. This asymmetry arises from prevailing winds, currents, and the hydrodynamic limits of medieval sailing vessels. A spherical (non-Mercator) projection is used, better reflecting great-circle geometry and the true spatial relationship of regions such as Scandinavia, Shetland, and Iberia.
July 19, 2025 at 7:01 AM
docuracy.co.uk
Thanks, @drpda.bsky.social, this looks like a really useful source, as it includes dates and waypoints for a number of long-distance voyages. 👏

I'd love to get hold of Paula Martin's transcript, though: any suggestions of how I might do that?
drpda.bsky.social Philip Allfrey @drpda.bsky.social · Jul 5
This is impressive work, I wish I had a use case for it!
For a paleography course I took a decade ago we looked briefly at a journal of a 17th century Scots mariner. It's been digitised at collections.st-andrews.ac.uk/item/journal... Paula Martin made a transcription, but I don't know if it's online
Journal of Alexander Gillespie, skipper in Elie
Manuscript sailing journal of Alexander Gillespie, skipper in Elie, Fife, recording details of his trading voyages between 1662 and 1685.<br/> <br/> <br/>This journal records voyages undertaken by Ale...
collections.st-andrews.ac.uk
July 5, 2025 at 10:13 AM
docuracy.co.uk
🌍 Ports are now (optionally) shown on the eRutter to help with route picking.

🤔 They're currently fetched from @wikidatacommunity.bsky.social, but this would be a great use case for a @whgazetteer.org temporal API to filter out modern ports and highlight ancient ones.
At low zoom levels, cluster markers indicate the locations of ports. At higher zoom levels, each port gets its own marker, coloured by category.
July 5, 2025 at 9:57 AM
docuracy.co.uk
🪄Historical Sea Routing is now much quicker to load, reload, and compute seasonally-plausible sailing routes, thanks to some behind-the-scenes browser magic. Find a 6500-mile return trip in under 1 second!

🛟 Do you have historical voyage data which might help with calibration? [1/3]
July 4, 2025 at 9:07 PM
docuracy.co.uk
🌍 I've just published this here docuracy.github.io/Historical_S... for anyone to play with.

Screenshots, code, and caveats at github.com/docuracy/His....
July 2, 2025 at 6:46 PM
docuracy.co.uk
🧭 Building a lightweight sea-routing graph for historical GIS & DH use cases beyond simple port-to-port hops. Edges are weighted for ~5km coastal preference. Aiming for serverless exploration of connectivity in historical maritime trade. ⚓️ #MaritimeHistory #HistoricalGIS #DigitalHumanities
Diagram of historical sea routing graph for Europe. Diagram of historical sea routing graph for Europe, showing (in red) weighted edges in the zone favoured for coastal sailing (~5km).
June 16, 2025 at 7:26 PM
Reposted by Stephen Gadd
whgazetteer.org
Want to work with the WHG team? The Institute for Spatial History Innovation @ Pitt is hiring a full-time Research Associate to be the Digital Data Specialist & Managing Editor of World Historical Gazetteer!

Learn more & apply by July 11: bit.ly/4kAknki

@rmostern.bsky.social @docuracy.co.uk
Job Opportunity - Research Associate at Institute for Spatial History Innovation | World History Center | University of Pittsburgh
The University of Pittsburgh's Institute for Spatial History Innovation (ISHI) is currently accepting applications for a full-time Research Associate to act as the Digital Data Specialist. The selecte...
bit.ly
June 11, 2025 at 3:05 PM
Reposted by Stephen Gadd
isabellemarie.bsky.social
Medieval England’s Road Network Mapped Using the Gough Map.
www.medievalists.net/2025/05/medi...
Medieval England’s Road Network Mapped Using the Gough Map - Medievalists.net
A new study uses the Gough Map to reconstruct medieval England’s road network, revealing how Roman routes shaped travel for centuries.
www.medievalists.net
May 11, 2025 at 8:19 AM
Reposted by Stephen Gadd
whgazetteer.org
🌍 Recent updates to the WHG user interface give faster loading and globe visualisations.

Image: Indigenous Place Names in North America, a WHG Place Collection at doi.org/10.60681/whg...

Explore more at: whgazetteer.org !

#DigitalHumanities #HistoricalGIS #GeoHumanities #HistoricalGeography
Globe visualisation of Indigenous Place Names in North America, a WHG Place Collection [https://doi.org/10.60681/whg-collection-172]
April 30, 2025 at 1:38 PM