The aim of this project is to estimate population of swiss communes (=municipalities) for the last 8 centuries, put it on a beautiful map and share it with the world! See the result here: https://dddpt.github.io/swiss-population-time-machine/
The data comes from the Swiss Historical Dictionary, a wonderful online encyclopedia on Swiss history. All communes have population data back to 1850 (start of the official Swiss Statistics); some have data going back to around 1400, and a rare few even have data going as far back as 1170!
Once this is done, it could always be possible to add roads, historically used communes' names, etc. A boy can dream.
The names speak for themselves:
- 0_pop_scraping: scraping of the data from DHS
- 1_pop_cleaning: cleaning (part automated, part by hand) of the data
- 2_pop_extrapolation: extrapolation of population for all communes
- 3_maps: creation of the map(s)
As of 16.06:
- scraping & cleaning is done for all communes existing in 2017 except canton Thurgau (2162 units), todo: no longer existing communes should also be scraped&cleaned
- extrapolation is done in a simplistic bruteforce way: done with the average growth rate of all communes having data in given timespan.
- Map is functional ;-) (With some mistakes, locations and population data having been joined with a fuzzy merge on communes' names)