Historical dataset of administrative units with social-economic attributes for Austrian Silesia 1837–1910

Abstract

Scientists from many disciplines need historical administrative boundaries in order to analyse socio-economic data in space and time. In this paper, we present a set of historical data consisting of administrative unit boundaries and exemplary socio-economic attributes for Austrian Silesia, an historical region located in modern Czechia and Poland. The dataset covers nearly 700 administrative unit boundaries on the level of cadastral or political communes and their subparts and was acquired through manual vectorisation of historical maps (1:28,800) from the period 1837–1841. The local-level units can be easily joined into higher-level divisions such as court or political districts for the period 1837–1910. The data can then be combined with statistical data collected approximately every 10 years for a similar period. Within the quality assessment, the relations between cartographic and census data and their credibility are analysed. The present dataset provides many possibilities for joining a wide range of historical statistical data to better understand various demographic and economic processes based on advanced analyses, e.g., by using GIS.

Mid-19th-century building structure locations in Galicia and Austrian Silesia under the Habsburg Monarchy

“…the first empire-wide topographic mapping initiative based on a proper map projection (Affek, 2015;Skaloš et al, 2011;Timár et al, 2010). Due to the high quality of the maps, their relatively low positional errors, and their large catalogue of land use categories, they are often used in land use reconstructions for different parts of the Habsburg Empire (Feurdean et al, 2017;Kaim et al, 2016;Munteanu et al, 2015;Pavelková et al, 2016).…”

Vectorization of Historical Maps Using Deep Edge Filtering and Closed Shape Extraction

“…Manually extracting the content of historical maps with GIS tools is still the main strategy in digital humanities. This solution is conceivable when small-size datasets are handled, in space and time, for peculiar case studies [26]. Collaborative approaches have been proposed to handle larger map corpora, ranging from a limited number of contributors [27] to large-scale crowdsourcing experiments [34,5].…”

Mid-19th-century building structure locations in Galicia and Austrian Silesia under the Habsburg Monarchy

“…Potentially, the hamlets could have been moved from one village to another over time, which, in some cases, makes comparisons over longer periods difficult (Ostafin et al, 2020).…”