MENA Historic Shapefiles

This document provides background information for shapefiles produced by the authors. All shapefiles described in this document are available via the the Arab Council for Social Sciences Dataverse and the Harvard Dataverse. These shapefiles capture spatial information for key social, political, and economic phenomena, recorded in publicly-available maps of the Arabic-speaking Middle East and North Africa (MENA). For each shapefile, we record map metadata, a URL to the original raster file, the ISO Topic Code for spatial features, as well as relevant background information and issues arising from the geo-referencing process. All map features, e.g., label names, follow the spelling and transliteration systems used in the underlying raster or source file.