Computer Mapping of Geography and Border Crossing in Scandinavia‪.‬

In modern European societies, maps are seen as the natural way to communicate about geography. This is different in other historical periods. There are many examples of historical periods in which maps were not used much, although they are known. In my opinion, this lack of use is not based on a lack of cartographic tools or knowledge only. There are other reasons why people choose to use verbal texts to communicate about geography, reasons that may be difficult to see for people living in a modern map based society. With respect to humanities computing, modelling is an experimental method based on similar methods in the natural sciences. Modelling is to create and manipulate models in order to learn from the experiences we gain through the process. Models are in this context representations of something, which are created for the purpose of studying this "something" more closely. The result of this kind of work is not the model we create, but the modelling process itself. This process will be repeated. Each time, changes will be made based on the experiences of previous work. New questions will emerge, which may be answered by changing factors in the experiments, eventually leading to more questions (McCarty 23-24). The process of modelling is similar to a process of close reading, but instead of storing the results as prose or in the mind of the researcher, and then creating conceptual structures from that, each fact is stored as a triplet in a fact database. At the time of text reading they are only stored and interconnected, not analysed and integrated based on any idea of truth. Such analysis and integration will come later. This article describes the application of such methods to a non-fiction text from the mid eighteenth century. The goal of the research is to develop a richer understanding of how people represented in the text expressed themselves, with a focus on geographical matters. From the late fourteenth century, the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden were united in various personal unions known as the Kalmar Union. Sweden broke out of the union in the early 1520s, whereas Norway stayed under Denmark until 1814. In the peace treaty after the Great Nordic War in 1720 there was an agreement that negotiations should be initiated in order to clarify the border between Norway and Sweden, the latter including what is now Finland. The first meeting of the border commission eventually took place in 1738, and by 1741, the first part of the border was established. The work was done based on surveys in the field and on witness statements taken up in situ. In 1742 the work on the Danish side was reorganized and Peter Schnitler was appointed the task of going before the border sergeants and collect evidence. The extreme points of his three journeys, Brekken and Vard0, are more than 1200 kilometres apart in airline. Significant parts of the text in the manuscript that he handed over to the Danish government consist of transcripts of local court sessions carried out by Schnitler in order to gather information about the local population as well as their view of the border areas. The material includes information directly relevant to the border question, as well as general information about the areas in question. The text corresponds to similar material collected through work carried out in other parts of Europe at the time (Burke, A Social History 128-29). The court transcripts are based on interrogations about geography with more than 100 individuals. The voices in the text represent persons coming from different ethnic and professional backgrounds, thus bringing a number of different perspectives into the text.