Historical Travel and Communications in Finland

The HISCOM project pilots methodological approaches to the digitisation of historical roads from the Senate Atlas (Senaatinkartasto, by the Russian military administration of Finland in 1870-1907, scale 1:21,000 and 1:42,000) into a Geographic Information Systems database. The pilot succesfully produced a proof-of-concept GIS database of over 29,000 individual road segments from Satakunta and Varsinais-Suomi in south-western Finland. This dataset is shared with all interested potential collaborators, who are free to use the data in exchange for methodological comments, critique and advice (contact Eljas Oksanen and Anu Lahtinen). Pending further funding, the long-term goal of the HISCOM research initiative is to combining contextualised and source critical analysis to 'big data' analysis of the cartographic evidence, to create a comprehensive GIS road map database of late Early Modern (c. 1650-1809) and Autonomy Era (c. 1809-1917) Finland from various atlas sources, and subject it to broad range of qualitative and computational analyses to produce new information on a rich range of economic, social, political and cultural process linked to historical travel and exchange.