Ryan Horne

Ryan was the Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Digital History at the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh from 2017-2019.  During his fellowship, Ryan led several workshops at the Digital Scholarship Commons at the Hillman Library including “Introduction to Network Analysis and Visualization” and “Introduction to QGIS.” In the summer of 2020, Ryan became the Sinai Manuscripts Digital Library Data and Metadata Coordinator in the Digital Library Program at UCLA.

Prior to coming to the WHC, Ryan was a postdoctoral research fellow jointly appointed in the History department and the Carolina Digital Humanities Imitative at UNC Chapel Hill, where he earned his Ph.D. in History in 2015. He is a comparative historian who focuses on geospatial humanities, the construction of social networks, and hegemonic power and civic opposition in borderland communities. In addition to his own own research, Ryan develops new software and methodologies that uniquely combine geospatial, textual, and social network analysis. A portfolio of Ryan's work is available at https://rmhorne.org/digitalportfolio/.

Ryan was previously the director of the Ancient World Mapping Center (AWMC) at UNC Chapel Hill, an interdisciplinary research center that specializes in historical geography and geographic information science in pre-modern Mediterranean area. Under my directorship, the AWMC transitioned from an organization that previously focused on the production of
print maps into a center with an active research agenda embracing geospatial databases, spatio-temporal research, and semantic web technologies. Through working with interested faculty members, students, and external partners, the center has become the premier provider of open-access geographic data covering nearly a millennium of cultural and physical change. By embracing linked data standards, he led the center into collaboration with other organizations, including Pelagios Commons and the PeriodO gazetteer of historical periods, to further develop geo-humanities research and open data exchange. As part of Ryan's work at the center he developed the Antiquity-À-la-carte web mapping application and Strabo Online. Ryan also completed a geographically accurate, freely-accessible digital map of pre-modern Europe and Western Asia. Now receiving nearly one million views a year, this resource has been enthusiastically adopted by diverse projects including the al- Thurayyā Islamic Gazetteer, Stanford's ORBIS application, and the Pelagios Commons initiative. He published an article detailing these efforts in the ISAW Papers series.

In addition to work and the Ancient World Mapping Center, Ryan has extensive experience developing, editing, and maintaining digital gazetteers. He serves as an editor on the Pleiades gazetteer and graph of ancient places, which serves as an authoritative source for data on over 35,000 ancient locations in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Through collaboration between editors, users, and students Pleiades has developed into a critical component of the larger ancient world linked data ecosystem, and serves as a powerful pedagogical tool for the study of ancient geography and history.