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Interwar Poland, 1934 - Administrative Districts
Palatinate:
District:
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Download GIS Files:

Geospatial Sources:

  • Mapa Rzeczypospolitej Polski (Map of the Second Republic of Poland). Warsaw: Wojskowy Instytut Geograficzny. 1934.
     

Tabular Sources:

Usage:

  • The above datasets are intended as an extraction of the original published demographics. As such they represent the political situation of the time and have been subject to great scrutiny from contemporaries then and historians since. Users of the data are highly encouraged to review the surrounding literature before utilizing the data in derivative products.

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  • The original intention of the dataset was to provide a GIS basemap upon which all interwar demographics could be mapped, analyzed and compared. The 1934 source map thus matches well with 1931 census results. However the 1921 and 1926 census results reflect slightly different administrative structures. While I have puzzled over how to match the districts together, in the end I never actually solved these problems (it was just a masters thesis). If you devise or know of a solution please send it along and I may rethink things or provide a link to your solution. Another idea would be to just build additional GIS layers for each dataset. I suspect these may be out there but I never found a source with districts other than the 1934 map cited.

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  • The current cleanup and reorganization of this data has been prompted by recent requests from people interested in a GIS basemap of Interwar Poland. I've always thought that surely someone else in Poland must have created better layers over the years yet I don't think any are publicly available. If there are better sources being distributed then please drop me a line and I will link folks over to them. Its been close to 20 years since I have looked into these matters so my apologies if I am missing things.

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  • For the GIS basemaps I am providing them under the Public Domain Dedication and License v1.0. As such the data is free to utilize, copy, steal - anything you want. However as I did spend many a 1990s evening in the University of Wisconsin Geography lab hunched over an old digitizing board clicking these polygons into existence, attribution would be most appreciated.

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Notes:

  • This web map uses D3.js and Leaflet.js to display the administrative districts stored in the above TopoJSON geometry file. The geospatial data is projected and overlaid upon OpenStreetMap tiles. My assumption is that interest in Polish interwar administrative districts will remain light to nonexistent without overtaxing the OpenStreetMap servers. This is bit of an experiment in progress, the main point is to quickly allow users to judge the detail and/or appropriateness of the dataset to determine whether to download the data to use in their GIS. Feedback is always appreciated.

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  • The OGC Geopackage specification is a relatively new open format for sharing GIS and tabular data. Currently the format is fully supported by ESRI ArcGIS 10.2 and higher and partially supported by QGIS 2.4 (spatial data only). It is expected that forthcoming versions of QGIS will fully support reading both spatial and tabular tables. Drop me a line if you'd like the data in a different format but note that I am not much interested in cutting shapefiles.

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Change Log:

  • Version 201401 - August 2014
    In response to several requests for this GIS data, I decided to reorganize the data in combination with interest in the new geopackage and topojson formats. As part of this I did topology cleanup on all the datasets and snapped some clearly out of whack linework to OpenStreetMap. In particular I tidied up the Baltic coast.

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  • Version 201402 - September 2014
    Corrected some small naming errors in the layers and moved the color coding of districts into a static field for D3 performance. Added School Children Census of 1926 data.

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