Measuring Historical Settlement and Agricultural Structure from Topographic Maps: An Object Detection Approach for South Korea, 1918 and 1970

초록

We construct a new grid-level historical dataset for South Korea by applying YOLO-based object detection to 1:50,000-scale topographic maps from 1918 and 1970, yielding 1 km×1 km counts of residential houses, rice paddies, and other annotated land-use symbols on the Korean national standard grid. The house variable captures the standardized small-square symbol used for individual rural dwellings and should be interpreted as a measure of dispersed rural settlement rather than total housing stock. Internal consistency checks, a cell-level temporal-persistence test between 1918 and 1970, and an external cross-check against the 1930 colonial census at the township level support the dataset's use as a baseline spatial measure of rural settlement and agricultural land use. The dataset is made publicly available, providing a new resource for long-run regional analysis in Korean economic history.

키워드