The Mapping Brisbane History Project is a new website tool for historians wishing to undertake geographic-oriented investigations, across 64 local study areas within the city’s present-day boundaries, from the colonial period to the present day. It was launched in March 2018 with over 1,000 sites marked with entries by epochs and local areas, with further expansion planned. A related project on ‘Brisbane Thinkers and Local Researching, Educating, and Informing Institutions’ is now taking shape, extending the idea of how institutions can be mapped as sites in the landscape to how institutions of formative thinkers can be mapped through conceptual networking. In both projects, the work is performed on the local scale yet important national and global dimensions came to the fore.

Using these digital projects, this paper reflects on balancing the demands of scale in avoiding provincial outlooks without imposing a false and bland globalist perspective. The approach fits with the attention given to intersecting local, regional and global networks by historians in recent years, as in Niall Ferguson’s The Square and Tower: Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power.