We recently began a research project focusing on the social topography of Vienna in the fifteenth century at the Division for the High and Late Middle Ages at the Institute for History at the Freie Universität Berlin. The source material is the corpus of the city's land registers, which record real estate transactions as well as mortgage transactions. From these manuscripts, not only the locations and prices of Viennese houses can be derived, but also information on their owners, for example gender, occupation or marital status. In order to process the large amount of material, the HTR software Transkribus is used to automatically create a machine-readable transcription. This will serve as the starting point for a digital edition of the land registers. During the processing of the texts, all relevant entities are marked up according to XML/TEI standards, and the resulting data is stored in a central database. The goal is to link this with a GIS, so that the output of the data can also be vividly visualized by means of a virtual city map.
The project on Vienna is just one of many research projects that take advantage of the new digital possibilities to expand our knowledge of the socio-spatial structure of pre-modern cities. But international networking is still in a very early stage. Within the framework of our conference, we would therefore like to gather a group of scholars who also approach the social topography of urban spaces in Europe using digital methods. We look forward to contributions from projects at various stages of completion, including exposés of planned projects, workshop reports of ongoing projects or, results of completed projects. Through this exchange, it is our intention to achieve a closer international cooperation of historians using similar interdisciplinary and DH-based approaches to late medieval/early modern urban studies. In the longer term, we plan to build a web platform where users can find out about the current status of various projects and which can thus serve as a first port of call and networking space for all interested parties.
If you are interested, please send your proposal for an active (in-person if circumstances allow) contribution in the form of an abstract of about 300 words together with a short CV (about 100 words) by November 15, 2021 via e-mail to: j.helmchen@fu-berlin.de