Session details

Organizer(s)

Vincent Lemire (Centre de recherche français à Jerusalem), Frédéric Moret (Université Gustave Eiffel) and Paul Lecat (Université Gustave Eiffel)

Keywords

Urban Archives, Digital Humanities, Epistemology

Abstract

Making the history of an archive and understanding the conditions of its production and conservation is fundamental for any historian work. City historians are often confronted with complex linguistic and administrative contexts, as well as problems of dispersion, displacement or even disappearance of archives. Their work are therefore often restrained to a rather small part of the available documentation. In order to allow a better connection between archives, and hence create new research perspectives on urban societies, dozens of researchers specialized on cities from all over the world, with various contexts, and on periods ranging from the Middle Ages to the second half of the 20th century have joined forces in the Archival City project to think about new ways of describing, visualising, interrogating and using urban archives. This project aims to highlight the intellectual research operation that the composition of a corpus of sources or the extraction of data from an archive represents, as a primordial step prior to any historical analysis. In recent years, Archival City has served as a space for discussion and experimentation to develop a common culture and tools for the conservation, management and use of data from the past. The result is the development of a platform combining a tool for the description and indexing of archival corpus, access to OpenData datasets, as well as scientific articles that allow the retracement of the conditions of production of the corpus or databases.

This session will present the first achievements of the Archival City project, showing both the diversity of the research topics and the fruitfulness of this reflection on urban archives. Through this session, the aim is also to offer the urban history research community a methodological basis for reflecting on the place of archives in research work.

Papers

Archival Tools for Urban Archives and Urban History

Author(s)

Carole Lamoureux (Université Gustave Eiffel)

Keywords

Archives Tools, Methodology, Digital Humanities

Abstract

One of the main goals of the Archival City project is to give a meaningful and easy access to archival descriptions and publications for its six fields of research (Algiers, Bologna, Chiang-Mai, Greater Paris, Jerusalem and Quito). This concrete approach aims to question on an international scale the concept of urban archives and to experience the extent of normalization which must or can be used. To achieve this, several tools are being elaborated. Some of them, for archival description and data management, are common to all the studied cities. However, as Archival City’s fields have their own scientific investigations and distinct types of archives and data, the tools elaborated for data visualization are tailor-made for each one of them.

The mutual tools are the web-based and open source application AtoM, developed for archival descriptions, and an Open Data portal, intended to store and to display the datasets generated. Among those datasets are research data, but also raw and encoded transcriptions of primary sources. The main challenge here is to use common norms for very diversified and plurilingual datasets in order to allow their long-term conservation and accessibility while respecting their singularities. Alongside this Open Data portal, the use of AtoM is the key stone ensuring a similar long-term accessibility to descriptions of urban archives on the basis of the international standards. This application is the common gateway to enter the project’s set of archives.

The tailor-made tools developed for each field of research consist in the valorization of relational and XML databases. They can be electronic publications, fully or partially (Préfecture de la Seine’s directories, for the Greater Paris field; notarial acts and other types of documents related to urbanization, for the Quito field…). They can also give the opportunity to display information about lost archives (virtual reconstruction of archival repositories, for the Bologna field…). Easy to use, these websites are being elaborated in order to ensure more advanced access and search functionalities into the datasets.

Public Streets in Administrative Yearbooks. A Crossover Study between the Street Services Archives and the Administratives Yearbooks

Author(s)

Paul Lesieur (Université Gustave Eiffel) and Loic Vadelorge (Université Gustave Eiffel)

Keywords

Urban Administration, Street Archives, Digital Humanities

Abstract

This proposal proposes a systematic study of the Organisation et Annuaire des Services. The latter deals with the history of the Parisian public streets maintenance, from 1860 to 1940, which conduct us to look after the Service de la voie publique and his engineers. For this purpose we have recreate the successive organizational chart and collected the data refer to the public street administration.

First, we will show the role this work played in the drafting of our corpus. Identifying brightly the services and staff mentioned in the archives description needs a thin comprehension of the internal structure and of the changes they have known. This study covers indeed a long period in which restructuration occurs many times, changing the name of the services. This could bring misinterpretation in the identity of the service producing the archives. The organizational chart allows also to rebuild the genealogy of services as we have done for the Service de la voie publique, finding the many other names it could have.

However, the interest of this study is much greater. The OAS contains plenty of data about structural reforms, additional services, staff, or localization of the offices... These information allows serial analysis and opens up new fields of investigation on administrative history and geography of Paris for a very large range of topics.

Moreover, this serial analysis we have made points us that the nature of the data contained in the OAS varies with the time. Especially on the occasion of restructuration, the form of the yearbooks change, some information disappear when other ones appear (personal or office address, awards, services at lower level…). This leads us to examine the question of the purpose of these yearbooks for the administration. We will try to outline some interrogation we have and exemplify them. Above all, we want to demonstrate that this kind of investigation needs the contribution of many historians specialist on the different topics handled by the municipal administration such as urbanism, public hygiene, environment… Thus we expect to stimulate further investigation in order to gain insight on the use of the administrative yearbooks.

LIBRA, a Database for the Diagnosis of Quito's Urban History

Author(s)

Tamara Estupinan (Universidad San Francisco de Quito) and Carlos Espinosa (Universidad San Francisco de Quito)

Keywords

Colonial City, Notarial Acts, Database

Abstract

LIBRA is a mega electronic database of more than 30000 documentary items drawn from the notary records in the National Archive of Quito and from the municipal registry of colonial and early republican Quito, Ecuador´s capital. The database provides a unique window not only into Quito’s exchange networks, but also into its ethnic diversity, built environment, land use, and religious life. A collaborative effort between the databases´ creator Tamara Estupiñan, an interdisciplinary team at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ), and the major international urban history project Archival City has recently systematized the catalogue of the sprawling database with digital app. The catalogue is not only a powerful digital search engine, but also replicates much of the database in its extensive descriptions.

Toponyms, anthroponyms, key architectural features, sacred landscapes, natural morphology, road networks, crops, artisan culture, and commercial transactions are among the social facts registered in the database. The database has already generated an innovative working hypothesis that the Inca settlement of Quito was dominated in the moment of transition to the colonial city by Atahualpa son Francisco Atahualpa, and was located on a different site than previously believed.

Specifically, the database has allowed for the identification of a classic feature of Inca urbanism, the juncture of two rivers as the ideal locus for urban centers. In this case, the rivers were the río Blanco. This siting of the Inca settlement replicated that of Cuzco and corresponded to the Inca concept of tincu, meaning the union of opposites, indicating wholeness. This identification of the Inca settlement of Quito, not only points to a meaningful landscape based on culturally specific spatial orientations, but also locates it off the Spanish grid pattern that was supposed to have been superimposed on the Inca settlement.

Inequalities as an Archival Order: the Case of the Bologna (13th-15th centuries)

Author(s)

Clément Carnielli (Université Gustave Eiffel)

Keywords

Archival Power, Status Assessment, Social Hierarchies

Abstract

If the “city air made your free”, it didn’t make you equal to your peers: late medieval urban societies were structured by hierarchies and statutes. These categories expressed the three dimensions in which inequalities can be approached: wealth, which became more a more a sign of respectability; power, expressed by the possibility to vote, and to be elected; social prestige, derived from the previous two, but also from criteria based on profession, ancestry. Inequalities are thus a way to rethink the entire organization of these societies, focusing on the values and criteria used to assess people and distribute them into distinct categories, as well as how these standards evolved. This better understanding of the foundations of a “urban social order” would give us better tools to study the consequences of an unequal society for those who belonged to it.

The assessment of social values was of course not a natural and unchanging process: it was constructed and transmitted by specific documents, whose aim was to reflect the organization and evolution of the social order. This archival aspect of the construction of inequalities is the subject of this session. It will analyze the case of late-medieval Bologna, whose archives we precisely know thanks to its inventories, available from the end of the 13th century. They make it possible to study how the organization of the city archives reflected an unequal order, and kept or reinforced it in the long run. This is one of the interests of the “Archival City” project (Gustave-Eiffel University), whose first results will be discussed here. They will be completed by a deeper dive into the archival aspect of the construction of inequalities, with a focus on fiscal sources. The objective will be to show the various approaches through which inequalities can be documented and explained, using both quantitative and qualitative methodologies.

Using these two scales, we will thus show how documents had a central function and a very concrete action in the construction of urban inequalities, and how, because of this central position, they constitute a major source for the understanding of late medieval societies.

When Inequality is Structure and Identity: Bologna and the Classification of Citizens in Italian Communes

Author(s)

Filippo Ribani (University of Bologna)

Keywords

Inequalities, Hierarchies, Archives

Abstract

Late Medieval society was based on inequalities and hierarchies, conceived as fixed, proposed as legitimate by the upper classes, and affecting many aspects of daily life. In Italy, a major differentiation was between citizens and peasants: these last were considered like animals due to their working and living conditions, and therefore much inferior to the refined, learned and wealthy city dwellers. This inequality was underlined by many literary texts belonging to the anti-peasant satire (flourishing between the XIV and XVI centuries), and was confirmed on the biological level by the doctors, who in their regimina sanitatis described how the body of manual workers was different from that of the rich, thus requiring a different diet and lifestyle.

This social and biological differentiation was translated by the Italian urban ruling classes into a system of government based on fiscal, judicial and political inequalities: citizens were subject to a different (and lighter) fiscal regime than the country dwellers, whose crimes were usually punished more severely, and who were excluded from the political councils of the city. The identity of the citizenship was largely built on this difference with the countryside and its inhabitants. At the same time, urban society was intrinsically differentiated: for example, manual workers and immigrants were usually excluded from the city councils.

My contribution will focus on the archival documentation of Bologna, addressing issues related to the effective implementation, at different levels (judicial, political, and fiscal), of the «ideology of difference» which dominated the urban culture of the late XIII to XV centuries, paying particular attention to those documents (tax lists and beneficia citadantie) which contradict the immobility that it should have imposed on society. I will examine the relationship between the individual condition (work, residence, wealth, and even physical appearance), and the enrolment in one of the categories into which the population was divided, trying to frame how the change in one could affect the other.

The Paris Metropolis in 1954, Social and Spatial Inequalities

Author(s)

Valérie Gouet (IGN) and Paul Lecat (Université Gustave Eiffel)

Keywords

Digital Humanities aerial photography Spatial analysis

Abstract

On the occasion of the French population census of May 1954, the INSEE and the Institut d'Aménagement et d'Urbanisme de la Région Parisienne jointly collected statistical data on the population and housing of the communes of the Seine. In a context of an exacerbated housing crisis, highlighted by the Abbé Pierre appeal, the public authorities were seeking to develop a data analysis tool that crossed information on family structure and socio-professional categories with a description of buildings and housing comfort. In order to allow a fine spatial analysis, the data have been agglomerated at the scale of the 15,950 blocks of the Seine department (including 5,100 in Paris). This work was carried out for 72 of the 80 communes of the Seine department, including Paris and its suburbs.

The serialization of these data and their spatial analysis, thanks to the transcription of the plans appended to the fascicles and their vectorization within a Geographic and Historical Information System, offers researchers an essential data set for the study of the Parisian metropolis in the mid-20th century. In addition, these data have been cross-referenced with a collection of vertical and oblique aerial photographs collected by the IGN at that time, which offers an overview of the materiality of the city, including the illegal shantytowns which appeared at that time and which were only rarely recorded. The cross-referencing and precision of the data at the block level thus allows for a detailed analysis of local situations, from the centre of Paris to the communes on the outskirts of the agglomeration, and makes it possible to produce a cartography of social and urban inequalities that tend to blur the traditional historiographical divisions between Paris and its suburbs.

Visualizing Quito in the Inca era: Employing Digital Mapping and Modeling to Retrace Inca Quito (1500-1570)

Author(s)

Carlos Espinosa Fernández de Córdova (PhD, University of Chicago and Professor at Universidad San Francisco de Quito)

Keywords

Colonial City, GIS, 3D Modeling

Abstract

Archival City is a global, interdisciplinary project that combines urban history with the digital humanities. Based at the Université Gustave Eiffel in France, it seeks to conserve and make accessible archival sources and retrace, through digital technologies, the historical trajectory of six urban centers around the world: Chang Mai, Paris, Bologna, Algiers, Jerusalem and Quito. The Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ) is collaborating with Archival City, in the Quito field, to catalogue with the aid of the ATOM cataloguing app (Access to Memory) an indispensable electronic database that concentrates the notary records of the Andean city of Quito in Ecuador. This enormous database, known as LIBRA, contains commercial transactions in Quito from the early colonial period to the early twentieth century, providing a window into the built space of the city, its landscape, its ethnic diversity, its economy, its religious life and urban governance. As a source for the early colonial era, it also enables the investigation of the Incaic and native background of colonial Quito, as there are multiple references, in the earliest strata of notary records, to pre-Hispanic legacies, including still-standing pre-Hispanic edifications, and surviving spatial ordering and sacred sites.

In addition to the digital cataloguing of the LIBRA database, the interdisciplinary USFQ team is mobilizing the digitalized catalogue of the vast Libra database, to systematize archival data through visual imaging, including digital GIS maps plotting references to pre-Hispanic legacies and 3D BLENDER modeling of Inca era Quito. My presentation at the Congress of European Association of Urban Historians will show how the use of digital mapping and modeling powers our understanding of the complex Incaic settlement in Quito.