ABSTRACT
The Central Eurasian Interactive Atlas (CEIA) originated at the University of Washington (UW) in the late 1990s as part of an effort to assemble large, coordinated sets of demographic, socioeconomic, and political spatial data for the Russian Federation. It was designed to facilitate more systematic quantitative social science research on contemporary Russia and the former Soviet Union by faculty and students in UW’s multidisciplinary Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies program (REECAS). Development of the CEIA figured as one facet of a larger proposal to develop a Central Eurasian Information Resource (CEIR), which the UW and several nearby academic partners submitted to the Department of Education in 1999 under its program for Technological Innovation and Cooperation in Foreign Information Access (TICFIA). Funding from that program from 1999 through 2003 made it possible to create a CEIA pilot database, which now encompasses all of the Russian Federation (see <https://green.lib.washington. edu/website/ceir/>). Substantial headway has also been made in developing comparable coverage for selected Central Asian countries and Ukraine.
