CShapes
CShapes is a dataset that provides historical maps of state boundaries and capitals. The dataset is coded according to the Gledisch and Ward (1998) state list and the Correlates of War list of dependent territorial units (Russett et al, 1968). Territorial changes are coded based on a variety of sources, including the Territorial Change Dataset (Tir et al. 1998) and other encyclopedial sources. Provided in a geographic data format, CShapes can be used directly with standard GIS software, allowing a wide range of spatial computations. In addition, we supply a CShapes package for the R statistical toolkit. This package enables researchers without GIS skills to perform various useful operations on the GIS maps. The new 2018 version has been introduced in Schvitz, Rüegger, Weidmann, Gleditsch, Cederman, Girardin (2018) and covers the entire 1886 to 2017 period.
Access the dataset in Shapefile, GeoJSON, SQL, and KML format for use with GIS software.
Embed CShapes into your own map through its vector tile server.
Find out how to install the cshapes R package and use it for computing country distance matrices etc.
Documentation
| Codebook (PDF) | Coders | |
|---|---|---|
| CShapes 2018 |
Download
The current version of the EPR dataset family is available in research-ready country-year format from the GROWup Research Front-End data portal.
You may also download the latest version (2018, to be released son) of the raw CShapes data directly in CSV (UTF-8 encoded), Excel (.xls), Excel 2007 OOXML (.xlsx) and Shapefile formats:
| CSV | Tab-delimited | GeoJSON | Shapefile | SQL | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CShapes 2018 |
Citation
When using these datasets in your research, please cite the following publication:
Previous versions
See the change log for the current version number and a list of revisions.
License
CShapes by CShapes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.