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 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.).

Abstract: The article describes a new online project presenting the statistics of the Russian Empire foreign trade in 1896–1917. The project has electronic tables with data on exports and imports throughout the period understudy and some parameters can boast a longer time period. In particular, it is the first time when consolidated time series has been published that cover the volume of foreign trade with all the countries and regions throughout the whole registration period (since 1827). The souce problems are adressed as well. Statistics of the project and the structure of on-line tables are discribed in detail. This online project is the first step to publish the consolidated statistics of the Russian Empire foreign trade. These statistics were published annually and their study involves time series analysis. In 1902 a book of collected statisctics was published, but it requires substantial amendments which haven't been done since. Now this work is planned to be completed and data tables are already available on the project website.