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IMC 2024: Sessions

Session 1138: Digital Anatomy of Late Medieval Vienna

Wednesday 3 July 2024, 11:15-12:45

Organiser:Julian Helmchen, Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin
Moderator/Chair:Lienhard Thaler, Institut für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte, Universität Wien
Paper 1138-aCreating a Network of People and Houses in Late Medieval Vienna
(Language: English)
Wolfgang Schmidle, Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin
Index terms: Archives and Sources and Computing in Medieval Studies
Paper 1138-bAnalysing the Resilience of Vienna's Housing Market Based on Digitised Property Registers
(Language: English)
Julian Helmchen, Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin
Index terms: Archives and Sources and Computing in Medieval Studies
Paper 1138-cFrom Tax Records to Historical GIS: Mapping a Viennese Neighbourhood
(Language: English)
Selina Thomalla, Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin
Index terms: Archives and Sources and Computing in Medieval Studies
Abstract

Around 1500, an estimated 20,000 people lived in the city of Vienna in 2000 houses. By using thousands of event and plot descriptions from previously unedited land registers and tax lists, we located many of these houses on the city map. The session will center around the ways in which automatic handwriting recognition, named entity recognition and geoinformation systems have been used in the indexing process, as well as on initial socio-economic analyses based on the resulting “biographies” of people and houses.

We have developed a simple analysis language for formalizing the relevant information. Annotations can be created manually or with rule-based or machine learning approaches. The results are easy to understand without IT knowledge and can be unambiguously translated into an ontology as well as displayed via TEI. 

With this material we capture the relationships between places and people and combine them into a network. This network provides insights into the social topography of late medieval Vienna. One focus is the investigation of the effects that the 15th century military and social crises had on the real estate market. For example, we traced evidence for migration during the Hussite Wars.