Preliminary Programme

A tax registers database for a GIS on the geography of Southern Italy at the end of the Middle Ages : the Liber Focorum of the Kingdom of Naples at the time of Alfons the Magnanimous (1442-1458) and the registers of the Principality of Taranto in the age of Giovanni Antonio Orsini Del Balzo (1446-1463)

GIS can represent a valid support for historical research given that data are properly structured and organized. In fact, historical data (and in particular tax registers data) are spatially distributed so the possibility to display their geographic locations together with information regarding taxation represents a significant added value for Historians. As a consequence, the possibility to produce maps to be explored and analyzed in a GIS environment can lead to a better understanding of phenomena in humanistic research.
In the frame of two projects co-financed by the Italian Ministry of University and Research an interdisciplinary research team of Historians and Geomatics experts has collected tax registers data regarding the Kingdom of Naples at the time of Alfons the Magnanimous (1442-1458) and the Principality of Taranto (the biggest feudal entity of that Kingdom, with ambitions of political autonomy) in the age of its last prince, Giovanni Antonio Orsini Del Balzo (1446-1463). A georeferenced database has been designed and implemented to store the data, with the aim of highlighting the network of settlements and the political, administrative, feudal, demographical and economical geographies of a late medieval State and of one of its major regional components.
In this paper the design concepts and the achieved results are presented; in addition the system potentialities with respect to historical research are discussed. (Show less)

At the time of Napoleon, the prince-elector of Bavaria was promoted to the dignity of a king and was granted a significant increase of his territory. Almost all territories that make up the region of Franconia came under Bavarian rule. The last gain of these Franconian territories was a region that was later named Unterfranken (Lower Franconia). It was taken over by Bavaria in the year 1814.
In view of the upcoming 200th anniversary of this event, researchers at the Chair for Franconian Regional History are currently working on a GIS-based atlas about the history of the Government Disctrict in the last 200 years. The project is financed by the District of Unterfranken (Bezirk Unterfranken) and is planned to be finished by the beginning of 2014.
The atlas will comprise about 50 short essays, each with a map illustrating the information in the text. The authors only hand in the texts and ideally some information that is helpful for the mapping process. The actual mapping is done at the Chair for Franconian Regional History using MapViewer 7.0 by Golden Software.
Once the atlas is finished, it will be the first historical atlas of one of the seven Bavarian Government Districts.
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The Project „Atlas of Sources and Materials for the History of Old Poland” aims at building a uniform system for gathering, analyzing and accessing the information and sources concerned with the research on historical geography of the Polish territories within the borders before 1772. The informatics platform using GIS toolkit and spatiotemporal databases will store in a uniform form the results of historical geography investigations conducted in various scientific centers both in Poland and abroad.
In the first stage of the project the database structure, considering the collections of Historical Atlas of Poland in the 16th century, Historico-Geographical Dictionary of Poland in the Middle Ages, Atlas of Confessions and Religions in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the second half of the 18th century, will be elaborated. The network of settlement units in the Crown (Historical Atlas of Poland in the 16th century) in the 16th century comprises around 25-30 thousand villages, towns, cities etc. Most of them, above 80%, will be included within the basic information, like the contemporary name, historical names, approximate size, ownership type, legal status etc. and connected with the entries given by the Historico-Geographical Dictionary of Poland in the Middle Ages together with the original (digitalized) sources, e.g. tax registers, canonical visitations, demographical censuses) . On the other hand, the database of the Atlas of Confessions and Religions in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth registers all sacral objects (churches, temples, synagogues) with the information about the building material, patronage type, titles of churches and administrative affiliation. The database relations between historical sources (published and digitalized) and historical geoinformation locate the project on the border between so called spatial and digital humanities.
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The GIS technologies have completely changed the way of working on historical sources. Now researches can not only do the interactive maps but also can edit and publish all statistical sources in easy way. This kind of technologies have been adapted by the group of historians in the Department of the Historical Atlas (Polish Academy of Sciences) during the works under the ‘Historical Atlas of Poland in 16th century’.
The GIS has changed the ‘Historical Atlas of Poland’ which was printed as a book with many maps. Now we can create not only the printed, but also interactive maps with full edition of the all tax registers.
The aim of this paper is to present the project, main sources and technical issues used during the work. Apart these things there will be the presentation of the 16th century tax registers, used as a main statistical source to the social and economical issues with connection to the GIS programs. Also there will be a demonstration of the WebGIS application connected with our data. We will show how we build the databases, and present the way of making them available to the historians and hobbyists from the whole world. (Show less)