Space, Sense and Censuses: Mapping Early Modern City Life in Tuscany

Colin Rose, Brock University

Historical GIS is now a common tool for urban historians interested in placing large amounts of data into a coherent spatial framework of analysis. Historical sources such as census records offer rich spatialized datasets that allow social science-minded historians to analyze demographic and social data within a cartographic framework, with the number of data points pushing into the millions in some cases. However, most easily-coded census data dates from the 19th century or afterward, when standardized postal systems came into effect that allow modern historians to place buildings and individuals into mapped space with considerable automation. Early modern demographic sources are much less easily mapped: early modern Europeans thought prepositionally and relationally about space, rather than cartographically. Early modern thinking located people and places by their positions relative to each other or to defined landmarks. This prepositional thinking challenges early modern urban historians working with HGIS. We require creative solutions to bring together the imprecise and messy structures of early modern source materials with the precise and neat locational thinking of GIS methods. This paper argues that HGIS can and should be deployed in early modern urban studies precisely because we can adapt its methods to the problem at hand, and thereby bring greater analytical insight to how people lived, moved and worked in early modern cities. The Digitally Encoded Census Information and Mapping Archive, which analyzes early modern Tuscan cities, has worked to develop methods for transforming early modern thinking into modern analyses. A series of case studies from Florence, Bologna and Livorno in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries demonstrate the benefits of such an approach to “prepositional cartography”.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 152. Urban Historical GIS: Social History