Historical Travel and Communications in Finland, c. 1650-1917 (HISCOM)

The project Historical Travel and Communications in Finland, c. 1650-1917 (HISCOM) aims to break new ground by bringing in the plentiful and previously underexploited cartographic evidence for historical roads from a series of Finnish eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century map sources. Combining qualitative, contextual, and source critical analysis to mass-data analysis of the cartographic evidence, HISCOM will create a comprehensive GIS road map database of Early Modern and Autonomy Era Finland. Analytically, HISCOM will advance the study of cartographic materials in historical and archaeological research. It will produce a new assessment of historical change in the structure and character of the travel and communications network from the Early Modern Period to the early twentieth century. We will determine how the network structures changed and what regional differences obtained, investigate why these changes took place and what processes governed them.