Abstract: The article describes the experience of teaching the course “Historical Geography and Geographic Information Systems” within the framework of the specialization “Historical Informatics” at the Department of Historical Informatic Science, Faculty of History, Moscow State University. We teach this discipline to third-year undergraduate students. The course includes several thematic blocks. The first one is devoted to Russian historical geography, and the main difficulty is to fit this voluminous course into several lessons and leave time for the remaining blocks. The second block is the basics of cartography, the history of cartography in Russia (that is, source studies of historical maps), and here we can also speak about electronic libraries of raster and vector historical maps of Russia. The third block is devoted to the substantive basics of spatial visualization. This block seems to be the most important: learning to use the proper software is an important, but it is the least constructive part of the research. It is more important to understand how to set tasks correctly and what complexities are typical to this type of visualization. Within this third block we examine both entertainment projects and research articles using historical maps. The last block of issues studied within the framework of the course is the basics of GIS software studying. We study QGIS here: it is officially freeware, cross-platform, it uses the wide-spread shapefile format, and it is well compatible with open Internet services, such as OpenStreetMap and the Google maps. Students learn to draw shapefiles upon raster maps, to attach data from spreadsheets to their vector maps and to create thematic maps, to transform the projections. We hope that our methodological experience will be useful to teachers.

Abstract: The article is devoted to the role of the Trans-Siberian Railway in the freight supplying of the Russian Far East in 1903–1913 (since the commissioning of its last section through Manchuria along the CER). Methodologically, the article is based on a comparison of various sources: customs, port, railway statistics, reports of the Dobrovolny flot (Voluntary Fleet), etc. It is concluded that the sources do generally provide a possibility to conduct a study in the period under review, and it can be based on different tables from the foreign trade yearbooks and railway statistics on transportation to the Ussuri railroad.
The statistics are considered in two ways: 1) "import - transportation from Russia" and "by sea - by the railroad". This allows us to draw conclusions about where the goods mainly came from and how they got to the local market. Comparative statistics are built for the most important categories of goods: cereals, sugar, fuel, timber, metals, textile, etc. A comparison of the freight transportation by the railroad and by sea showed that, at least until 1909, the railroad supply was not significant, but began to grow later, when the railway transportation to the region helped to reduce the share of imports, especially in terms of supplying textiles and some categories of metal goods.

Abstract: The article describes technological aspects of digital historical map creation taking as an example the 1891–1916 Trans-Siberian Railroad map. The author faced two tasks. On the one hand, he wanted to create a historical GIS map in shapefile format; on the other hand his goal was to tell us about software tools and data which proved to be most suitable for solving the first task. Present day map services can be of use at the initial stage of digital map creation in case most of objects coincide with current ones. It is important however to know where discrepancies begin. The author studies various open access map services both corporate (Google, Yandex, Bing) and those created by many users on a crowd sourcing basis (OpenStreetMap, Wikimapia). He pays particular attention to work with Google Earth application which he considers to suit better than specialized GIS applications for the initial formation of a set of objects on the map (in this case, railway lines). The author compares open map services in particular those providing access to aerial (satellite) images of the Earth and addresses different kinds of cartographic systems properties as useful tools for historical GIS creation (satellite images, panoramic photos, the Wiki mode user comments, etc.).