ViTA
Manorial (economic) Networks in the Medieval Tyrol: Mapping and Visualisation
Imagine a digital map of medieval Europe, where you may zoom into single households and retrace not only where they were located, but also assess their economic situation.
The research project ViTA (Vernetzungen im Tiroler Alpenraum - Manorial Networks in the Medieval Tyrol) creates an interactive map focusing on the Starkenberg family and Friedrich IV of Habsburg that is linked to historical data that are used to answer a broad variety of questions, like the variation of settlements, levies, economic inequality or agricultural production. It provides information on the regional linguistic landscape (various types of places), climate history (changes in agricultural structures and output) or power relations (income, manorial rights).
The project aims to make a first step towards such a map with the respective Knowledge Graph (KG) in the background by building and testing a prototype of an expandable digital infrastructure for the systematic recording, presentation of landed property and the associated levies. The prototype is generated by late medieval data of the Tyrol. The data originate from 1379 (treaty of Neuberg) to 1426 (expulsion of the Starkenberg from Tyrol).
Planned Steps
1) Princely and noble estate registers are selected as primary sources and further digitised
2) After transcribing and semantically annotating these unpublished sources
3) the relevant information is transferred into a KG. The latter forms the data basis for
4) the interactive map that includes charts, diagrams and special map layers
5) This digital infrastructure serves as a prototype for a spatially and chronologically expandable system that provides information for
6) historical analysis
The project is located at the Leopold-Franzens-University of Innsbruck and is funded from March 2023 to March 2025 by the Austrian Academy of Sciences as part of the Go!digital programme.
Project Team
Tobias Pamer
(Project Coordinator & Principal Investigator)
Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften und Europäische Ethnologie
Lienhard Thaler
(Research Assistant)
Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften und Europäische Ethnologie