BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//pretalx//pretalx.com//spathum24//talk//JFY3HZ BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:CET BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20001029T040000 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=-1SU;BYMONTH=10 TZNAME:CET TZOFFSETFROM:+0200 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20000326T030000 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=-1SU;BYMONTH=3 TZNAME:CEST TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0200 END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT UID:pretalx-spathum24-JFY3HZ@pretalx.com DTSTART;TZID=CET:20240925T153000 DTEND;TZID=CET:20240925T160000 DESCRIPTION:Premodern urban economy relied massively on annuities as a (mos tly) real-estate-based credit instrument\, turning houses into an importan t economic factor. Sources on transactions related to real estate are gene rally dispersed in the archives – and any finding is hard to localize pr ecisely\, which is probably why real estate has played a minor role in res earch on the premodern urban economy. Finding means to research such trans actions on a large scale allows us to discover a dynamic field of economic activity. \n\nThe ability to address such questions for Basel is based on the Historical Land Register of Basel\, known as “Historisches Grundbuc h Basel”\, initiated in 1895 and developed over several decades (see htt ps://dls.staatsarchiv.bs.ch/records/1016781). The creation of this land re gister involved a thorough plowing through large parts of Basel’s city a rchives. Each mention of a house prompted the creation of a file card\, wh ich contained an almost verbatim transcription of the source\, accompanied by a date and additional details. These cards\, approximately 120\,000 in total\, were organized by house and sequenced chronologically. Due to thi s arrangement\, any discovery within the register can potentially be local ized and dated. The wealth of information within the historical land regis ter is unparalleled for the era since it is not limited to one corpus but contains combined information from various corpora.\n\nFor the Spatial Hum anities 2024 conference\, we want to discuss two significant challenges: o ne related to the process of georeferencing data and one to strategies for data analysis in space and time.\n\nLocalizing houses\n\nWhen the Histori cal Land Register was established\, it was decided to base its structure o n an 1862 address book of the city of Basel. That was a pragmatic decision that allowed for an easily manageable structure for researchers. However\ , this structure was faulty for obvious reasons: it could not consider the changes that occurred during several centuries of building activity and r eal estate trading. When sources indicated that plots were divided or unit ed\, the editors of the Historical Land Register created new house dossier s linked to the exact address of 1862. This has the advantage that the dyn amics of plots and housing can be retraced at the cost of having multiple dossiers linked to one address. These dossiers were then described as bein g “part of” plots as they presented themselves in 1862 or having multi ple addresses in 1862 in case of plots that were split later. Based on thi s metadata and the dates we can extract from the records\, we can establis h some kind of “plot history” for the whole city (see an example for o ne street in the annexed document). By the way\, this plot history is one of ownership rather than one of construction. For example\, a person might have bought a neighboring house at some point and built a new house in pl ace of the two old ones at some other time. This last activity generally c annot be identified in the sources.\n\nThe paper will present our current strategies for establishing a plot history. We intend to use rule-based pr ocedures based on metadata to displace points in probable directions. The intention is not to find precise locations for houses that no longer exist but to create plausible approximations. The handling and representation o f uncertainty is a major challenge in this process.\n\nSpatial analysis\n\ nHaving established a usable localization for the houses in Basel\, we can start analyzing the real estate market. Based on procedures that will not be presented here\, we intend to identify the primary transaction of each record in the Historical Land Register using machine learning methods. In a preliminary analysis\, we tried to identify seizure procedures. Using a regex search in the HTR-recognized texts\, we found about 9’500 such pr ocedures from around 1350 to 1800 AD. In the annexed document\, we show tw o representations of these data: plotting all points on a 19th-century cit y map and using a clustering algorithm by QGIS.\n\nFor the Spatial Humanit ies conference\, we will explore various spatial analysis strategies for s uch data and challenges linked to representing the results in space and ti me. In addition to using analysis tools and procedures\, we will focus on two aspects. Firstly\, we explore the use of known physical and cultural s tructures of the city space (such as streets\, suburbs\, church parishes\, etc.) to structure our data or their representation. Secondly\, we intend to revert the process\, using our data to determine the city's relevant s tructures and economic hotspots.\nFor this part of our paper\, we will pre sent the preliminary result of an exploratory phase in our research. \n\nT he Spatial Humanities Conference 2024 will be the ideal occasion to presen t such findings based on a rich data set to a competent public\, allowing us to develop our research further! DTSTAMP:20260411T012538Z LOCATION:MG1 00.04 Hörsaal SUMMARY:Representing the dynamics of premodern real estate transactions in space and time. Challenges using the Historical Land Register of Basel - B enjamin Hitz\, Tobias Hodel URL:https://pretalx.com/spathum24/talk/JFY3HZ/ END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR