The HISCOM Project. Exploring Methodologies for Large-scale Digitisation of Historical Roadways

The study of historical travel and communications networks has the proven potential to yield significant new understandings in political, social, economic and cultural history across spatially and temporally extensive scales. A key development that has over the last decade unleashed this promising turn and furnished a wide range of analytical approaches is the adoption of Digital Humanities methods, including Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analysis and Spatial and Social Network Analysis. The recent pilot project HISCOM: Historical Travel and Communications in Finland c. 1650-1917 at the University of Helsinki (March-September 2022) has explored methodological innovations for large-scale digitisation of historical road and produced a test dataset of roadlines covering a significant region of south-western Finland from the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth century Senate Atlas (Senaatinkartasto).