The historical town information system

Today's historic research is often based on quantitative and statistical methods. Carrying out historic research on town development involves examining large amounts of data of various sources, e.g., historical town maps, statistics and photographs. Careful evaluation of these sources includes time-consuming tasks, such as selecting, combining and comparing data, setting out and checking hypotheses and the graphical presentation of end results. The Historical Town Information system (HIST) facilitates these tasks: it is a tool for managing and visualizing social, economic and infrastructure data, meeting the special requirements for historic research. One of the aims of the HIST project is to explore the potential benefits and requirements of information technology for the social sciences. As a research prototype system, HIST also provides an interesting application area for new technical trends in spatial information systems. The origins and present state of the HIST are discussed in this paper, together with an application of the system in a historic research project on electrification and town development.