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RESEARCH PRODUCT

À la recherche des maillages communaux d'antan. Présentation du projet ANR COMMUNES et de quelques résultats préliminaires

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The COMMUNES project aims: 1) to produce the first H-GIS in the world providing annualised boundary data for all French municipalities from the Revolution to the present day. Each spatial unit will include population data and metrics of access to networks of transport; 2) to develop a multimodal model of transport to allow the dynamic analysis of the relationship between economic and demographic changes and accessibility from the end of the 18th century to the present day; 3) to represent and analyse on a very fine scale some key demographic and socio-economic phenomena. Our method for reconstructing historic administrative boundaries combines the study of historical and cartographic sources, as well as other cartographic documents from local administrative archives and cadastral maps. The effort to produce new transport data will be spearheaded by ThéMA, which created the first H-GIS of the French railway network, and will complete the road network and reconstruct the waterways for this project. Enriched with other historical information, this H-GIS will be a reference for researchers in the humanities and social sciences.