CV

Karl Grossner, Ph.D.

Denver, Colorado US. Updated November, 2025
Contact: .

Education

Doctor of Philosophy in Geography
University of California, Santa Barbara, December, 2010
Representing Historical Knowledge in Geographic Information Systems
Supervised by Michael F. Goodchild

Bachelor of Science in Instructional Design and Technology
California State University, Chico, June 2005, summa cum laude

Research Interests

Knowledge representation for geographic and geo-historical information systems; computational representations of place and time; event-centered ontologies; historical geographical movement; spatial thinking and learning; digital atlases of history and culture

Positions Held

Technical Director and Lead Developer
World Historical Gazetteer project, University of Pittsburgh World History Center
May 2017 – July 2024

Founder, sole proprietor
KGEO Research, Denver, CO
January 2017 –

Digital Humanities Research Developer
Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR), Stanford University Libraries
January 2012 – September 2016

Research Specialist
Center for Spatial Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
2010 - 2011

Founder and President
World Heritage Web, Inc., Palo Alto, CA
2003 - 2017

Software Product Design Manager
Netage, Inc., West Newton, MA
1999 - 2001

Interactive Scholarly Works

• Mostern, R., Grossner, K. World Historical Gazetteer. Roles: Co-investigator, Technical Director, Lead Developer. http://whgazetteer.org (v3.0, July 2024)
• Ligda, K., Grossner, K. (2016). Authorial London. Roles: Co-investigator; lead designer/developer. http://authorial.stanford.edu
• Hodder, I., Grossner, K., Engel, C., and Meeks, E. (2014). Çatalhöyük Living Archive. Roles: Research design and lead developer.
• Christensen, J., Grossner, K., and Meeks, E. (2013). City Nature. Roles: Research design and lead developer.
• Scheidel, W., Meeks, E., Grossner, K. (2012). ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World. (v1). http://orbis.stanford.edu/. Role: Web application developer.

Peer-reviewed Publications

• Grossner, K., Mostern, R. (2024). The Lure and Limits of Linked Data: the case of World Historical Gazetteer. In Spatial Humanities 2024, Bamberg Book of Abstracts PDF
• Grossner, K., Grunewald, S. & Mostern, R. (2022) Bringing places from the distant past to the present: a report on the World Historical Gazetteer. International Journal of Digital Libraries 24, 159–162 (2023). Online article
• Grunewald, S., Mostern, R., Grossner, K. (2022): The world historical gazetteer: a digital humanities interface for transregional research, In: TRAFO: Blog for Transregional Research (2022), Online article
• Grossner, K., Mostern, R. (2021). Linked Places in World Historical Gazetteer. In 5th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Humanities (GeoHumanities'21), Beijing, China. ACM, New York, USA. PDF
• Grossner, K. (2017). Spatial Concepts. in D. Richardson, N. Castree, M. Goodchild, W. Liu, A. Kobayashi, & R. Marston (Eds.) The International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley/AAG. PDF
• Grossner, K., Janowicz, K. and Keßler, C. (2016). Place, Period, and Setting for Linked Data Gazetteers. In R. Mostern, H. Southall, and M.L. Berman (Eds.). Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. PDF
• Engel, C., and Grossner, K. (2015). The Archaeological Process at Çatalhöyük: Creating A Living Archive. In I. Hodder, A. Marciniak (Eds.) Themes in Contemporary Archaeology: Assembling Çatalhöyük. Maney Publishing. PDF
• Grossner, K., and Janelle, D.G. (2014). Concepts and Principles for Spatial Literacy. In D.R. Montello, K. Grossner, and D.G. Janelle (Eds.). Space in Mind: Concepts for Spatial Learning and Education. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. PDF
• Montello, D.R., Grossner, K., Janelle, D.G. (Eds.) (2014). Space in Mind: Concepts for Spatial Learning and Education. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. MIT Press page
• Goodchild, M. F., Janelle, D. J., and Grossner, K. (2014). Critical Spatial Thinking. In R. Stimson (Ed.). Handbook of Research Methods and Applications in Spatially Integrated Social Science. Edward Elgar Publishing. Press page (paywalled)
• Meeks, E., and Grossner, K. (2012). Modeling Networks and Scholarship with ORBIS. Journal of Digital Humanities 1, no. 3 (Summer 2012). Article
• Grossner, K. (2012). Finding the spatial in order to teach it. In Kastens, K.A. & Manduca, C.A. (Eds.) GSA Special Paper 486, Earth and Mind II: A Synthesis of Research on Thinking and Learning in the Geosciences, pp. 87-90. PDF
• Grossner, K. (2010). Representing historical knowledge in geographic information systems. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, United States -- California. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses. (Publication No. AAT 3439428). PDF
• Grossner, K. (2010). Event objects for spatial history. In R. Purves, R. Weibel (Eds.) Extended Abstracts Volume, GIScience 2010, Zurich. PDF
• Grossner, K. (2010). Geolibraries. In B. Warf (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Geography. Los Angeles: SAGE.
• Grossner, K., Goodchild, M. and Clarke, K. (2008). Defining a digital earth system. Transactions in GIS, 12(1):145-160. PDF
• Grossner, K. and Clarke, K. (2007). Is Google Earth, 'Digital Earth?'? Defining a vision. In Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Digital Earth, Berkeley, CA. PDF

Invited Talks, Panels, and Workshops

• Connecting Places in the World Historical Gazetteer (Workshop co-convener and presenter). in World Historical Gazetteer Sustainability Meeting. University of Pittsburgh. 11-13 March 2024.
• World Historical Gazetteer: an introductory workshop (Workshop convener and presenter). British Library. 18 January 2024.
• Disambiguation in World Historical Gazetteer (Invited presenter). in Disambiguation of Places Workshop. University of Warsaw. 5-7 December 2023.
• World Historical Gazetteer (Workshop convener and presenter). University of Vienna. 5-6 June 2023.
• World Historical Gazetteer (Workshop convener and presenter). Linked Pasts 6. 10-11 December 2020.
• Representing Place in World Historical Gazetteer. Speaker Series: Knowledge Representation and GeoHumanities; UC Santa Barbara Center for Spatial Studies; 27 October, 2020.
• Andris, C., Ayers, E., Grossner, K., Hu, Y., Hart, K., Thatcher, J., Tally Jr., R. T., & Giordano, A. (2020). Panel Paper: Towards Geospatial Humanities: Reflections from Two Panels. International Journal of Humanities & Arts Computing: A Journal of Digital Humanities, 14(1/2), 6–26. Online access
• World Historical Gazetteer, The Linked Open Data Workshop for Buddhist and Tibetan Studies. One-day Conference (Keynote and workshop leader). Columbia University; November 2019.
• Introducing World Historical Gazetteer (Workshop co-convener and facilitator). IISG; Amsterdam, Netherlands; October 2019.
• Event Objects for Linked Pasts (Keynote and discussion co-leader) Archaeological and Historical Event Modeling as Linked Data. Ghent, Belgium; September 2019
• Linking Pasts with Names, (Panel co-convener and speaker). Association for Computing in the Humanities. Pittsburgh, PA; July 2019
• Linked People (discussion session). Linked Pasts IV symposium (co-convener). University of Mainz; December 2018
• World Historical Gazetteer, (Invited talk). Third International DH Slavery Workshop. Vanderbilt University; May 2018
• Linked Places --> Linked Pasts (Invited talk; session co-convener). First US Semantic Technologies Symposium. Wright State University; March, 2018.
• Linking Pasts with Historical Gazetteers (Invited talk). Vanderbilt University Library, November 2017.
• From Linking Places to a Linked Pasts Network (white paper). Linked Pasts III symposium (co-convener), Stanford University; December 2017.
• Spatial Discovery III Expert Meeting. (Expert meeting: invited participant). University of California, Santa Barbara, May 2019. (http://spatial.ucsb.edu/2019/spatial-discovery-3).
• Linked Places, Linked Pasts (Position paper, invited participant). Spatial Discovery II Expert Meeting, University of California, Santa Barbara, June 2017. (http://spatial.ucsb.edu/2017/spatial-discovery-2).
• Joining Place and Period in Historical Gazetteers (Workshop: invited presenter) in A place for places: current trends and challenges in the development and use of geo-historical gazetteers. Digital Humanities 2016; Krakow, Poland; July 2016.
• A Next-Stage Digital Geo-library (Position paper, invited participant). Expert Meeting on Spatial Discovery, University of California, Santa Barbara; June 2015. (http://spatial.ucsb.edu/2015/spatial-discovery).
• Geospatial Narrative: Perspectives from the humanities, cartography, and geographic information science. (Half-day workshop, organizer, participant). Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research; Stanford University; May, 2015.
• Geographic Search (Position paper, invited participant) in Spatial Search specialist workshop, University of California Santa Barbara Center for Spatial Studies; 8-9 December 2014
• Setting a Research and Development Agenda for Moving Historical Geodata to the Web. Invited workshop at New York Public Library, 5-7 November 2014
• NEH World-Historical Gazetteer Workshop. (Invited participant). University of Pittsburgh, 4-5 September 2014
• ORBIS: First of many worlds? (Invited talk). World Seastems Workshop. Paris; June 2014
• Issues in Spatio-Temporal Technologies for the Humanities and Arts (Conference panel: panelist with Eide, Ø., Berman, M.L. and Ore, C-E.) at Digital Humanities 2013, Lincoln, NE US
• Mapping time, space, and narrative (Workshop: invited presenter), University of Chicago Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures, 5-6 Apr 2013
• Geo-ontology Design Patterns GeoVoCampSB2012 (Workshop, co-organized with Krzysztof Janowicz), Santa Barbara, CA, February 2012
• Towards an Emergent Spatial History Ontology (Invited talk) World Historical Dataverse monthly workshop, World History Center at University of Pittsburgh; October 2011
• Modeling Event-Based Historical Narratives: A Conversation between Digital Humanists, Information Scientists and Computer Scientists (Panel, co-organizer), Digital Humanities 2011, Stanford University, June 2011

Selected Conference Papers and Posters

• Grossner, K. and Mostern R. (2024). The Lure and Limits of Linked Data: the case of World Historical Gazetteer. Spatial Humanities, 2024, Bamberg
• Grossner, K., Mostern R., Grunewald, S., Michalewicz, N., Straub, A. (2022). Connecting Places in World Historical Gazetteer. Spatial Humanities, 2022, Ghent
• Grossner, K. (2019). World Historical Gazetteer. Digital Humanities 2019, Utrecht
• Grossner, K. (2019). Time in Place for Historical Gazetteers. Time in Space 2019, Pisa
• Grossner, K. (2017). Linked Places. Digital Humanities 2017, Montreal
• Grossner, K., and Ligda, K. (2016). Authorial {X}: A research and teaching platform for literary geography (poster). Digital Humanities 2016, Krakow, Poland
• Weimer, K., and Grossner, K. (2016). The GeoHumanities Special Interest Group of ADHO: Fostering and Facilitating the Spatial Turn (poster). Digital Humanities 2016, Krakow, Poland
• Grossner, K., Hodder, I., and Engel, C. (2015). Towards a Living Archive for Çatalhöyük (poster), Computer Applications in Archaeology 2015, Siena, Italy.
• Grossner, K. (2015) Joining Place and Period in Settings. Association of American Geographers (AAG), Chicago
• Grossner, K. and Meeks, E. (2014). Topotime: Representing historical temporality. Proceedings of Digital Humanities 2014, Lausanne, Switzerland
• Grossner, K., Hodder, I., Meeks, E., and Engel, C. (2014). A Living Archive for Çatalhöyük (poster). Computer Applications in Archaeology 2014, Paris, France.
• Grossner, K., Meeks, E., and J. Christensen (2013). Naturehoods: Measuring City Nature at Neighborhood Scale, Association of American Geographers (AAG), Los Angeles
• Grossner, K. (2013). Computing Place. Proceedings of Digital Humanities 2013, Lincoln, NE.
• Grossner, K. and Adams, B. (2011) COSIT at 20: Measuring research trends and interdisciplinarity, Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2011); Belfast, ME.
• Grossner, K., (2008) An Ontology-Driven Data Model for a Digital Historical Atlas, Historical GIS 2008 (HGIS2008), University of Essex, Colchester, UK

Grants

• Grant co-author and Technical Director on National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Advancement award, "World Historical Gazetteer: Toward a Digital Epistemology of Place" (2023-2025). $400,000

• Grant co-author and Technical Director on National Endowment for the Humanities Preservation and Access Grant award, "World-Historical Gazetteer" (2017-2020). $315,000

• Grant co-author and principal researcher on National Science Foundation grant award, "TeachSpatial: A Portal to Instructional Resources on Spatial Concepts for STEM Education." (2010) NSF-DUE #1043777. $50,000

Technical Competencies

• Software development: Python, Django, JavaScript, Rails, HTML
• Data stores: PostgreSQL, PostGIS, Elasticsearch, MySQL
• AI: large language models (LLMs), text embeddings, ChatGPT, Claude
• GIS software: QGIS, ArcMap
• Sysadmin: Ubuntu, CentOS, RedHat

Selected Awards

• University of California Graduate Opportunity Fellowship, 2009-2010
• Jack and Laura Dangermond Graduate Fellowship in GIScience, 2009
• National Science Foundation IGERT Fellowship in Interactive Digital Multimedia, UC Santa Barbara, 2005-2008

Reviews

International Journal of Geographic Information Science; Digital Scholarship in the Humanities; Semantic Web Journal; European Research Council; Antiquity; Digital Humanities conference series

Professional Memberships

Co-founder and co-chair, GeoHumanities SIG, an ADHO Special Interest Group, 2013 - 2017; Association of American Geographers, 2005 – 2017; Association for Computers and the Humanities, 2011 - 2023