Understanding the Basis of Schmitt’s Map of South Germany: Georeferencing the Sketches of Staržinsky and Sarret (Late 1790’s)

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Refer to my reviews/comments as attached.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thanks for the suggestions and corrections in the text, we applied all of them thoroughly. We suppose, red highlights were indicating the places to be edited (and we approved all of your suggestions). For the yellow highlights, we could not find any suggestions - we assumed these were coupled to your positive and approving comments, no need of text editing. If this is wrong, I shall initiate a second review round.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Authors,

 I thoroughly revived the manuscript and suggested some changes. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thanks for your important and focused remarks, we applied them as follows:

Comment 1: "In page 2 Line 78 presents are repeated twice."

Response 1: Corrected in text.

Comment 2:  "The conclusion section should be more explained"

Response 2: It is done (three sentences added to paragraph 2), as well as the Introduction is more focused to the goal of the study.

Comment 3: "Figures 2, 4 and 5 should be reproducing due poor visibility of text"

Response 3: The originals are much better, so we shall take care of this during the publishing process. However, in the review document we applied the full resolution versions of Figs. 4, 8 & 9. Figs 2 & 5 are in highest available resolution.

Comment 4: "Please compare your Cassini projection accuracy with Gauss-Krueger projection."

Response 4: Applying the UTM32 (which is comparable with GK…), the average error at the GCPs were 13% higher (central meridian 9 degrees east, which is pretty close to the 8.34E, the “ideal” projection latitude in Cassini, without applying the 5 degrees rotation mentioned by Stigloher, 1984).

Comment 5: "Why not use Lambert conformal conic projection instead of Cassini projection for Europe?

Response 5: The LCC was not used as early as the 1790s by the Habsburg surveys (in fact, not even later). As far as I know it was first introduced in practice by the French and Belgians in the first part of the 19th century. The real question is not "which projection can be used for georeferencing the Schmitt map and thus the Starzinky-Sarret sketches?" but "which projection was used indeed by the surveyors/mapmakers?" - This latter question is definitely answered by the Cassini, with Paris center.

Comment 6: "Where is the Method section? If 2. The Schmitt's map are representing methodology then please write as a main Heading "Methodology"" and Comment 7: "You missed the main heading of "result and discussion" section in the manuscript".

Responses 6&7: Thanks for these very important comments. Applied in chapter structure and in headings as follows. Chapter 2 is given a heading “Data & Methodology” as suggested and original Chapter 3 pasted into this (also methodology) as new Sub-Chapter 2.7. Chapter 4 was cut into three parts, eliminating the sub-parts: the first part (the original 4.1) gets a heading of Results, the second (original 4.2) gets a heading “Discussion”, while the original 4.3 gets a heading “Discussion 2”. This way, the Conclusions got the new order number of 6.

Comment 8: For Schmitt's map, you have used GCP 130 points, why not more

Response 8: As the goal was to reach the horizontal accuracy of 500 meters with GSB/NTv2 technics, this was well enough. However, the number can be increased, but the general characteristics of error distributions won't change significantly.

Comment 9: "Incorporate latest citation and references in the manuscript".

Response 9: three more and new ones added.

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is an impressive piece of scholarship, both on the archivistic side as on the technical side. The context of the creation of the map is very well detailed, the actors, and its content. This work should be published.

I only have four minor comments that I believe should be (easily) addressed:

1. Could the author make the point of their manuscript clearer? So far it is a little unclear, and lost in the many details provided in the introduction.

2. Could the author discuss how their work is situated relative to the literature and other works in a comparative perspective? Also, what is novel in their study, compared to eg Timar and Kiss (2024)? It is not clear when reading the manuscript, and the authors make numerous references to their previous work. It should be clear to the reader what is new in this piece of work.

3. Could the author provide more about the potential uses of their work by other researchers?

4. The authors provide a dataset, which is the georeferenced sketches as on Figure 9, which can be opened on Google Earth. However, could the authors provide to users the georeferenced map on Figure 1 (or at least where it can be found)? More generally, can they add a paragraph that clearly state where the users can find the output of their work, and how to appropriately open it and use it?

Author Response

Thanks for your focused comments. We applied your suggestions as follows:

Comment 1: „Could the author make the point of their manuscript clearer? So far it is a little unclear, and lost in the many details provided in the introduction”.

Response 2: Thanks for this important comment. We applied this by adding a new paragraph to the Introduction.

Comment 2: „Could the author discuss how their work is situated relative to the literature and other works in a comparative perspective? Also, what is novel in their study, compared to eg Timar and Kiss (2024)? It is not clear when reading the manuscript, and the authors make numerous references to their previous work. It should be clear to the reader what is new in this piece of work.”

Response 2: This is a specific and important extension of the Comment 1, so we answered itt he same way, in the above mentioned new paragraph of the Introduction.

Comment 3: „Could the author provide more about the potential uses of their work by other researchers?”

Response 3: There are three kinds of practical use of our results. First, as it is explained in the new 4. (the original 4.2) chapter, it is the georeferencing of photographed document. The second one is of broader interest, as mentioned in Chapter 2.4: the geo-referred character of a 200+ years old map piece, drawn before the main industrial age. However, as it was correctly pointed out by you, this one was published in our last paper (Timár&Kiss, 2024), so it worth here only a mention. Knowing details of the Starzinsky-Sarret survey are rather of historical and historic-geographical interest, as a tool to reach the above goal.

Comment 4. „The authors provide a dataset, which is the georeferenced sketches as on Figure 9, which can be opened on Google Earth. However, could the authors provide to users the georeferenced map on Figure 1 (or at least where it can be found)? More generally, can they add a paragraph that clearly state where the users can find the output of their work, and how to appropriately open it and use it?”

Response 4: Thanks for this comment. As the Reviewer 1 correctly pointed out, we left the Data Availability Statement erroneous in the first submitted version. Now it is corrected, with the web address of the geo-referred Schmitt’s map, available publicly at the date of the submission.