I have done a project to extract political and tribal boundaries of African countries that were under the British rule. The maps were scanned from the British colonial report. The extracted data are accessible from our Portal (https://maps.princeton.edu/). The boundaries were conflated to the GADM (https://gadm.org/) administrative boundaries so that researchers can use our historical boundaries with other GADM boundaries.
If any of you are interested in my methodology of extracting historical boundaries from a scanned map, you can read my paper "Guidelines for Creating Historical Geospatial Boundary Data" published in the International web journal on sciences and technologies affined to history of cartography and maps (http://www.e-perimetron.org/Vol12_1.htm).
Thanks,
-Wangyal
Tsering Wangyal Shawa
Geographic Information Systems and Map Librarian
Head, Map and Geospatial Information Center
Peter B. Lewis Library, Fine Hall Wing
Room A17, Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544
Phone: (609) 258-6804
Fax: (609) 258-4607
http://library.princeton.edu/collections/pumagic/<http://library.princeton.edu/collections/pumagic>
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From: Maps-L: Map Librarians, etc. [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Weessies, Kathleen [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, April 02, 2019 12:09 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Historical French colonial boundaries in Africa
We’ve been talking about having a GIS student create some historical world boundary shapefiles. They don’t seem to exist as shapefiles, only as a web service. If we develop some, we could host the shapefiles on our ArcOnline site, or we could host it on the Big Ten Academic Alliance ArcOnline site (or both).
French West Africa is an area of interest to us, something to consider. If your student does end up making one before we get around to it, please encourage her to share it! We will host it permanently and of course plaster her name all over the metadata!
One question we ran into right away is, whose version of boundaries do you follow? For world post-1945 we’ll probably use United Nations maps as reference. For French West Africa it makes sense to use IGN, an easier decision.
Kathleen Weessies
Social Sciences Coordinator; Head, Map Library
Michigan State University
[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
517-884-0849
From: Maps-L: Map Librarians, etc. <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Eliza Bettinger
Sent: Tuesday, April 2, 2019 8:09 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Historical French colonial boundaries in Africa
Hello All,
This is a long shot, but I'm wondering if any of you have a lead on GIS data containing boundaries of colonial French West Africa down to the cercle (political administration subunit) level. My patron (a grad student) is looking for data from about 1925.
My guess is that her only hope will be to trace a historic map image, but wanted to reach out to see if there's anyone out there will boundaries already created that they're willing to share.
All the best,
Eliza
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Eliza Bettinger
Digital Humanities Librarian
Research and Learning Services
106 Olin Library
Cornell University
Ithaca NY 14853 USA
607-255-4042 (office)
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