Interactive website to be launched about the social conditions of the Carpathian Basin

The interactive, bilingual, open-access electronic version of the National Atlas of Hungary: Society (e-MNA Society) will be published in Hungarian and English – www.nationalatlas.hu will present the current state of the entire Carpathian Basin’s social conditions. The website will be developed by the Eötvös Loránd Research Network’s Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences.

According to Nemzeti Atlasz, a national atlas can be defined as

“the given country’s ‘identity card’. […] It is usually a series of maps complemented with textual explanations and various illustrations, which show the given state’s natural, economic and social features through logically and proportionally constructed maps.”

The 02/2020 government decree on the Year of National Unity (Nemzeti Összetartozás Éve in Hungarian) awarded 280.7 million forints (802,000 €) to the project. The website is planned to be launched at the end of 2020 or the beginning of 2021, Hirado reported.

The digital national atlas covers the entire territory of the Carpathian Basin, its 17,660 settlements, and a total of nearly 40,000 settlements in the immediate vicinity of Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia. In terms of time, it presents the current and recent state of society (population, settlements, living conditions) and the processes of the last hundred years since Trianon. Nonetheless, some maps go back as far as the 16th century. Thematically, the project is divided into three large blocks, which represent the entire socio-geographical spectrum.

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The topic of the Population block is about population history, population density, natural population movements, migration, population composition (gender, age, family, household, ethnicity, language, religion, education, and social division). The Settlement block examines the past of the settlement, the settlement stock, the cities, Budapest and its region, and the rural areas. The Living Conditions block presents the human characteristics, the living environment, the settlement environment, and the settlement infrastructure.

The presentation of each topic is based on a territorial breakdown (county, district, settlement) and takes into account both spatial and temporal dimensions. This method enables researchers to follow the changes that have taken place in the structure of society and in the social processes since the division of the formerly politically unified Carpathian Basin.

The creation of an interactive national atlas covering almost 18,000 settlements is an ambitious and unique endeavour.

Currently, researchers work on data processing, content development, creating a legal structure to protect intellectual property, and establishing the IT background.

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Source: hirado.hu