Cartographier des trajectoires maritimes incertaines du XVIII \`eme si\`ecle

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to reconstruct and visualize uncertain 18th-century maritime routes from historical sources, providing an open-source tool for historians to analyze trade paths with quantified uncertainty.

Contribution

It presents a novel algorithm for automatically calculating maritime route geometries and an open-source platform for querying these routes with uncertainty levels.

Findings

The algorithm effectively reconstructs historical maritime routes.

The open-source tool enables detailed exploration of trade paths.

Quantification of uncertainty improves route validation.

Abstract

This article presents how ship trajectories have been built from historical sources dealing with maritime trade in the 18th century. It first summarizes the method for building the routes, and qualifying the uncertainty level linked to each of its segments. Then, it details how the geometries of these segments connecting two successive stopovers were automatically calculated in order to draw a map with maritime paths only. The algorithm, programmed with PL/SQL language, is available under an open-source licence (https://gitlab.huma-num.fr/portic/porticapi). Finally, an online tool for querying and mapping these routes with their associated level of uncertainty is exposed (http://shiproutes.portic.fr). We show its usefulness for historians, in particular for the control of the validity of built ship trajectories.