Economies of Space

Practices, Discourses and Actors on the Basel Real Estate Market (1400-1700)

Project
Cooperation
Historisches Grundbuch Basel
Author

Tobias Hodel

The project uses the example of Basel to research the management of urban real estate. The interest is directed towards economic discourses and practices as well as actors, whereby the analysis takes place in the perspective of a longue durée of 300 years. This is made possible by the use of digital technologies, AI-based methods to access data and computer-assisted evaluation procedures with which the Historical Land Register of the City of Basel (HGB) is processed. This makes it possible to combine innovative methods with tried and tested approaches in order to address historical research questions: machine evaluations complement each other with case studies that analyse economic practices and their linguistic repertoires down to the micro level of individual transactions and the actors involved. In this way, results and procedures emerge that are meaningful far beyond the individual case.

Publications

  • Burkart, Lucas, Tobias Hodel, Benjamin Hitz, et al. “Economies of Space: Opening up Historical Finding Aids.” Paper presented at Digital History Switzerland 2024 “Historical Research, Digital Literacy and Algorithmic Criticism” (DigiHistCH24), September 12, 2024. https://digihistch24.github.io/submissions/poster/466/.
  • Hitz, Benjamin, and Tobias Hodel. “Zeit und Raum.” Das Mittelalter. Perspektiven mediävistischer Forschung, June 18, 2025, 148–170. https://doi.org/10.17885/HEIUP.MIAL.2025.1.25126.
  • Hitz, Benjamin, Ismail Prada Ziegler, and Aline Vonwiller. “From Record Cards to the Dynamics of Real Estate Transactions: Working with Automatically Extracted Information from Basel’s Historical Land Register, 1400–1700.” Edited by Jérôme Baudry, Lucas Burkart, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, et al. 2024. https://digihistch24.github.io/submissions/462/.
  • Prada Ziegler, Ismail. “Exploration of Event Extraction Techniques in Late Medieval and Early Modern Administrative Records.” Proceedings of the Computational Humanities Research Conference 2024 (2024): 761–71. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3834/paper79.pdf.
  • Prada Ziegler, Ismail, Benjamin Hitz, and Katrin Fuchs. “The Basel Land Records Ground Truth: An Annotated Dataset for Information Extraction on German-Language Administrative Records.” Journal of Open Humanities Data 11, no. 1 (2025). https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.387.
  • Prada Ziegler, Ismail. “What’s in an Entity? Exploring Nested Named Entity Recognition in the Historical Land Register of Basel (1400–1700).” Paper presented at Digital Humanities Benelux 2024 Conference, June 6, 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.11500543.
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