BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//pretalx//pretalx.com//spathum24//talk//JFY3HZ BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:Europe/Amsterdam BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20230926T000000 TZNAME:CEST TZOFFSETFROM:+0200 TZOFFSETTO:+0200 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20231029T030000 RDATE:20241027T030000 TZNAME:CET TZOFFSETFROM:+0200 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20240331T030000 RDATE:20250330T030000 TZNAME:CEST TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0200 END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Representing the dynamics of premodern real estate transactions in space and time. Challenges using the Historical Land Register of Basel - Benjamin Hitz\, Tobias Hodel DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Amsterdam:20240925T153000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/Amsterdam:20240925T160000 DTSTAMP:20260811T044019Z UID:pretalx-spathum24-JFY3HZ@pretalx.com DESCRIPTION:Premodern urban economy relied massively on annuities as a (mo stly) real-estate-based credit instrument\, turning houses into an importa nt economic factor. Sources on transactions related to real estate are gen erally dispersed in the archives – and any finding is hard to localize p recisely\, which is probably why real estate has played a minor role in re search on the premodern urban economy. Finding means to research such tran sactions on a large scale allows us to discover a dynamic field of economi c activity. \n\nThe ability to address such questions for Basel is based o n the Historical Land Register of Basel\, known as “Historisches Grundbu ch Basel”\, initiated in 1895 and developed over several decades (see ht tps://dls.staatsarchiv.bs.ch/records/1016781). The creation of this land r egister involved a thorough plowing through large parts of Basel’s city archives. Each mention of a house prompted the creation of a file card\, w hich contained an almost verbatim transcription of the source\, accompanie d by a date and additional details. These cards\, approximately 120\,000 i n total\, were organized by house and sequenced chronologically. Due to th is arrangement\, any discovery within the register can potentially be loca lized and dated. The wealth of information within the historical land regi ster is unparalleled for the era since it is not limited to one corpus but contains combined information from various corpora.\n\nFor the Spatial Hu manities 2024 conference\, we want to discuss two significant challenges: one related to the process of georeferencing data and one to strategies fo r data analysis in space and time.\n\nLocalizing houses\n\nWhen the Histor ical Land Register was established\, it was decided to base its structure on an 1862 address book of the city of Basel. That was a pragmatic decisio n that allowed for an easily manageable structure for researchers. However \, this structure was faulty for obvious reasons: it could not consider th e changes that occurred during several centuries of building activity and real estate trading. When sources indicated that plots were divided or uni ted\, the editors of the Historical Land Register created new house dossie rs linked to the exact address of 1862. This has the advantage that the dy namics of plots and housing can be retraced at the cost of having multiple dossiers linked to one address. These dossiers were then described as bei ng “part of” plots as they presented themselves in 1862 or having mult iple addresses in 1862 in case of plots that were split later. Based on th is metadata and the dates we can extract from the records\, we can establi sh some kind of “plot history” for the whole city (see an example for one street in the annexed document). By the way\, this plot history is one of ownership rather than one of construction. For example\, a person migh t have bought a neighboring house at some point and built a new house in p lace of the two old ones at some other time. This last activity generally cannot be identified in the sources.\n\nThe paper will present our current strategies for establishing a plot history. We intend to use rule-based p rocedures based on metadata to displace points in probable directions. The intention is not to find precise locations for houses that no longer exis t but to create plausible approximations. The handling and representation of uncertainty is a major challenge in this process.\n\nSpatial analysis\n \nHaving established a usable localization for the houses in Basel\, we ca n start analyzing the real estate market. Based on procedures that will no t be presented here\, we intend to identify the primary transaction of eac h record in the Historical Land Register using machine learning methods. I n a preliminary analysis\, we tried to identify seizure procedures. Using a regex search in the HTR-recognized texts\, we found about 9’500 such p rocedures from around 1350 to 1800 AD. In the annexed document\, we show t wo representations of these data: plotting all points on a 19th-century ci ty map and using a clustering algorithm by QGIS.\n\nFor the Spatial Humani ties conference\, we will explore various spatial analysis strategies for such data and challenges linked to representing the results in space and t ime. In addition to using analysis tools and procedures\, we will focus on two aspects. Firstly\, we explore the use of known physical and cultural structures of the city space (such as streets\, suburbs\, church parishes\ , etc.) to structure our data or their representation. Secondly\, we inten d to revert the process\, using our data to determine the city's relevant structures and economic hotspots.\nFor this part of our paper\, we will pr esent the preliminary result of an exploratory phase in our research. \n\n The Spatial Humanities Conference 2024 will be the ideal occasion to prese nt such findings based on a rich data set to a competent public\, allowin g us to develop our research further! LOCATION:MG1 00.04 Hörsaal URL:https://pretalx.com/spathum24/talk/JFY3HZ/ END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR