The Historical Texts as Data project focuses on semantic annotation and extraction of data from historical texts in any language that have to do with the Gulf region. This project began with John G. Lorimer’s Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia, extracting 23000 unique place names in the Gulf region with a total of 51000 total annotations from the Gazetteer’s Geographical Dictionary and geolocating them. The project is also organizing and mapping the Dictionary’s statistical information (e.g. numbers of livestock or date palms) by geographical location in order to generate novel research questions. We provide visualization for some of this data and are exploring the creation of a more formal gazetteer While Lorimer’s Gazetteer is an iconic text for understanding British knowledge production about Gulf geographies, the project is currently incorporating historical texts in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, French, and Russian towards creating data representative of the Gulf region’s multilingual and multicultural identities as well as its history of imperial competition.