Preliminary Programme

The aim of this paper is to present the methodological and technical aspects of the digital elaboration of parochial sketches of the Kingdom of Poland from the 2nd half of the 18th century. Due to the unique structure of the sketches and their place in the process of preparation of the maps of palatinates of the Polish state’s territories, it is an exceptional material where space, text and map meet. Its creation is related to the campaign of cartographic study of the entire Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, conducted by Karol Perthées, the court cartographer of the last King of Poland, Stanis?aw August Poniatowski. In agreement with the primate of Poland, archbishop Micha? Poniatowski, the King's brother, a questionnaire was prepared and sent to parish priests throughout the country with a number of questions about the spatial structure of their parishes. In response, extensive descriptions of the parishes were obtained, on the basis of which carographers led by Karol Perthées developed parochial sketches and finally – maps of palatinates. Sketches, as a material between the depictions and the final map, are built by different types of elements: lists of settlements, cartographical drawings and narrative descriptions. The original depictions of the parishes of the Kingdom of Poland did not survive the destruction of Warsaw archives in 1944, and the preserved sketches have so far been the subject of a systematic study only for small areas of Poland (northern Podlasie). In the present research, a thorough elaboration and analysis of those sources is provided. The unique structure of the sketches and their important place in the preparation of maps required establishing new source-driven data model and the development of specific digital tools. Having those, sketches were indexed and the information regarding the settlement units were transferred to the database. In the next step, a critical analysis of the data, compared with data from the maps of palatinates (also indexed) and other sources, is being conducted. The main focus at this stage is the identification of the settlements and then preparation of the GIS map with the settlement network and administrative divisions of the Kingdom of Poland in the 2nd half of the 18th century. This brings some questions regarding, among other, the ontology of settlements, their systematisation, discrepancies in source descriptions and how to represent those doubts in the data model and at the end – in the digital map. The latter, as one of the main outcomes of the research project, will be linked with the scans of original sketches, maps of the palatinates and external databases (including „Historical Atlas of Poland” and „Polish National Register of Geographical Names”), enabling various ways of viewing scans of sketches, maps and both source and critical data. (Show less)

The author will present his research concerning reconstruction of late medieval and early modern regions of Croatian-Slavonian Kingdom. Presentation will also demonstrate innovative methodology and its implementation in the current research project. The methodology involves the use of several interdisciplinary fields, such as historical GIS, corpus based research and onomastics, as well as traditional use of primary historical sources. Most of the sources that were analyses within the scope of project pertain to the category of pre-modern serial records (for example church tithe records, records of tenants). (Show less)

The COMMUNES project, founded by the French Agency for national Research (ANR), is creating the first historical-GIS capturing all changes in the boundaries of French communes since the Revolution, linked to population data and combined with a multi-modal dataset of transport networks from mid-18th century to the present.
This collaborative project has five main objectives, which the communication will develop and illustrate with some results for each of them:
- Creating the first H-GIS of municipal boundaries for the whole of France over the last two hundred years (1790 to the present).
The methodology, inspired by the “England and Wales parish and place GIS”, is adapted to French sources and their diversity (historical maps like, Cartes d’État-Major and cadastral maps, but also archival records giving topographic descriptions of the boundaries). About 45 000 communes, existing or having existed from 1790 to the present, are considered in this infrastructure. Reconstructing, year by year, the territorial influence of the municipalities allows us to also reconstitute the upper administrative levels.
- Linking Ancien Régime parishes to 1790s communes, in order to get a spatial continuity beyond the administrative rupture induced by the Revolution.
We use Eric Brian’s compilation of parish listings from the Enquête La Michaudière (mid-1780s) and complementary data we have collected in the archives, which are linked to spatial data (Cassini maps or ancien administrative division). We have developed an algorithmic and geospatial method to match the communes we are recreating for 1790 to the Ancien Régime parishes.
- Adding to this H_GIS, the cartographic reconstruction of road, river and rail routes for the entire period and developing a multi-modal of transport networks, 1750 to the present.
The methodology is based on the experience previously acquired on the reconstruction of the French rail network. We use it to reconstruct the waterways network on the basis of maps, websites, primary and secondary sources.
This will give us homogeneous and comparable data on accessibility in the long run, and greatly help our understanding of the morphogenesis of the transportation network in France and of the impact of these innovations on territories. Using a multimodal graph analysis allows us to model and measure real-life accessibility (travel time, distance) between any points of the national territory.
- This geospatial infrastructure makes possible to link any data (social, economic, demographic, cultural, etc.), associated to an administrative entity, with the exact historical municipalities. A finer and systematic understanding of the relationship between statistical data and the ancient administrative units that were used to produce them, is a necessary pre-requisite for all socio-economic and demographic studies.
- At least but not last, all our data will be available to the whole community, freely and as widely as possible (following FAIR principles). (Show less)