Finnish thematic atlases: an examination of their content and methodology

Abstract

A detailed study is made of Finnish thematic atlases, principally the four existing editions of the Atlas of Finland, those of 1899, 1910, 1925 and 1960, and, for comparison, the Atlas of Social Statistics of the Rural Communes in Finland (1901), Atlas of Finnish History (1959), Atlas of the Archipelago of Southwestern Finland (1960) and Atlas of Finnish Folk Culture (1976). Each illustration, i.e. diagram or thematic map, in these works is reduced to its essential components and an analysis is made of the resulting variables: volume, topics, cartographic design, scale, areas described, areal units, points in time described and cartographic methods. The approach is a quantitative one to some extent, so that this work departs markedly from those surveys of research or presentational devices which are based only on intuition. The quantitative measures employed are the numbers of illustrations and their area on the pages of the atlases, problems of validity and reliability being obviated by the use of generalized diagrams to give the reader an impression of the results in relative terms rather than exact numerical tables. Finally these analyses are employed to build up a general picture of the nature of Finnish thematic atlases and of changes observable in the manner of their construction and the philosophies lying behind them.