Understand a place, not just find a page.
The Civic Graph is building a connected, sourced model of Boston and Cambridge. Nine editorial editions share one underlying record, but only entities that pass the review, provenance, confidence, locality, and rights standard are published. The working corpus is not treated as public simply because it exists.
One record of the past. One map of the future.
Founded by Serena Bhattacharjya, History Is For Everyone makes the Revolutionary past accessible town by town. The Civic Graph carries that editorial rigor forward, mapping the living future of Boston, Cambridge, and the colleges that shape them.
Why we built this
Almost everything you can read about a city is organized as separate pages — a page for a restaurant, a page for a museum, a page for a subway stop. None of them know about each other.
But that isn’t how a place actually works. Harvard Square is not a list of pages; it’s a university, a transit hub, a century of bookstores, and the streets between them, all shaping one another. To understand it, you have to understand the connections — and connections are exactly what the open web throws away.
So we are building the opposite: one stable record for each civic entity, joined by typed relationships into a single graph. A relationship becomes public only when both records clear publication review; descriptive claims remain attached to the sources that support them.
How it works
Every place is one record
A restaurant, a landmark, a person, an event — each is a single canonical entity with a description, a location, an image, and its sources. Not duplicated across sites; written once, shared everywhere.
Records are connected
Relationships are first-class: located in, near, served by, founded by, historically related. Each one is typed and, increasingly, explained — so you can see not just that two things connect, but why.
Understanding emerges
Once a reviewed corpus is large enough, the connections can support routes, explanations, and structural analysis. Until then, the public atlas, bounded API, and confidence register show only what is ready.
Every public record shows its work. Sources may include government agencies, transit authorities, city open-data portals, university archives, and open reference systems. Each published entity carries a confidence score and the factors behind it, so you can see how well we know what we’re telling you. It’s the opposite of a black box.
Who it’s for
Visitors
Start from a reviewed place and inspect its sources before following the public relationships around it.
Open the reviewed atlas →Locals
A civic guide that separates reviewed public records from unfinished inventory and keeps commercial relationships visibly disclosed.
Explore Cambridge400 →Students
Independent campus editions are in editorial development. They will expand only as useful, current, source-backed records clear review.
Guide to BU →Researchers & journalists
A bounded, queryable public record with provenance attached to every published entity and an inspectable API contract.
The open API →Tourism boards & cities
Commission a defensible edition with agreed coverage, methods, named review ownership, and measurement before publication.
Discuss an institutional edition →Universities & museums
Contribute authoritative sources and review expertise to one stable record that can be inspected across the network.
Start a data collaboration →Where it stands today
The graph grows through new sources, editor review, and institutional partnerships. Growth is not automatic: each addition must improve the public record without weakening its editorial standard. Boston and Cambridge are the first region because their campuses, neighborhoods, public institutions, and civic history are unusually intertwined.
Start with Harvard Square, inspect the publication standard, or explore the reviewed public atlas.