DECIMA: The Digitally Encoded Census Information and Mapping

Archive, and the Project for a Geo-Spatial and Sensory

Digital Map of Renaissance Florence

Nicholas Terpstra, Colin Rose

Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Volume 13, Number 4, Fall 2013,
pp. 156-160 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jem.2013.0055

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/521796

Access provided at 25 Mar 2019 15:54 GMT from Scuola Normale Superiore
156 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies  •  13:4

DECIMA:
The Digitally Encoded Census Information and
Mapping Archive, and the Project for a Geo-Spatial
and Sensory Digital Map of Renaissance Florence

Nicholas Terpstra and Colin Rose

A project at the University of Toronto, with funding from the Social

Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC), is
developing a mapping tool that will allow for the spatial organization of early
modern historical, cultural, and sensory materials.1 Called the Digitally
Encoded Census Information and Mapping Archive (DECIMA), it uses
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software to map, house by house, a
1561–62 Florentine tax census onto one of the best city maps produced in the
sixteenth century. This undertaking will allow scholars to understand the
social geography of Renaissance Florence in dynamic ways, creating a highly
adaptable ecosystem for the cultural analysis of a variety of problems and issues.
One key advance is that this project aims not simply to computerize a fixed field
of data, but also to develop a tool for the ongoing accumulation of material by
scholars in different disciplines, chiefly history, art history, literature, and
music. We also aim eventually to apply the experience developed in the
Renaissance Florence map to extend the tool to other early modern cities with
similar source materials. The DECIMA project contributes to the expansion of
historical GIS with a large database of historical maps and accompanying
datasets that will be accessible and expandable by a range of scholars.
DECIMA’s project to create a digital map of Renaissance Florence inte-
grates two sets of sources, one visual and one manuscript-based. The visual
source is a late-sixteenth-century axonometric projection (often known as a
“birds-eye-view”) of the city of Florence. It was originally produced in 1584 by
an Olivetan monk, Stefano Buonsignori, about whom little is known. Buon-
signori employed the common survey techniques of the sixteenth century to
produce a map that contemporaries recognized as exceptional, and that map
was widely reproduced for over a century. The map’s strengths make it an ideal
source for digitization. It is large, printed in nine sheets, with the original mea-
suring 123 x 138 cm. Using an extremely high-resolution digital reproduction,
 Special Issue • The Digital Turn: Notes 157

DECIMA researchers are able to zoom in to individual street and building

level without sacrificing the quality of the image. The map is of sufficient ac-
curacy that geo-referencing it in a GIS program has proven successful, al-
though the limitations of Buonsignori’s survey technique result in a slight skew
of the spatial accuracy in the eastern edge of the city’s southern Oltrarno dis-
trict. Finally, although the drawn buildings are often impressionistic, particu-
larly townhouses, Buonsignori was extremely careful in the drawing and loca-
tions of significant markers, including monasteries and convents as well as the
city’s churches, palaces, monuments, and city squares. This map forms the vi-
sual basis of the DECIMA Digital Map of Renaissance Florence.
The major text source for the DECIMA project is a 1561–62 tax census of
Florence called the “Decima Granducale.” This street-by-street, house-by-
house tax census was commissioned by Duke Cosimo I, and it includes exten-
sive information on the physical fabric and inhabitants of the city. The duke
received a presentation copy in 1562 that is available in a modern reproduction.2
The DECIMA project works with what were essentially the detailed notes
made by the census takers over the previous year as they moved house by house
through the city compiling data (held in the State Archive of Florence: Archivio
di Stato di Firenze, 325, Decima Granducale 3780–3784). Their records account
for the residents in each of the four quarters of the city (Santa Maria Novella,
San Giovanni, Santa Croce, and Santo Spirito) and devote a separate volume
to the city’s workshops and places of business or botteghe (ASF, 325, Decima
Granducale 3784). The census takers were assiduous in noting their route and
methodology, with each entry linked to the entries above and below it via a
description of the building’s relationship to its surrounding buildings, e.g.
whether it is attached to a building next door, is free-standing, or is the end of
a section of street and constitutes a corner. In taking careful stock of their own
progress through the city, the census takers provided future historians with a
clearly delineated route to follow, making the Decima Granducale an easily
traceable project as well as an ideal candidate for geo-coding and application to
a geo-referenced version of the Buonsignori map.
The census contains a wealth of information. Each entry (~10,000) con-
tains a description of the building’s location, a description of the building itself
(e.g. casa, monasterio), the type of holding (such as rental or bottega), the name
of the owner, the names of the heads of household, the number of households
living within the building, the total number of males and females, the total
number of residents, the assessed value of the holding for tax purposes, and the
158 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies  •  13:4

rents paid by tenants. By integrating the entire census with the axonometric
Buonsignori map, using a GIS program (the industry standard, ArcGIS™), the
DECIMA project is making this demographic portrait of Renaissance Flor-
ence accessible in dynamic and hitherto unavailable ways.
The project consists of two teams collaborating at the University of To-
ronto. The data team comprises three graduate students from the university’s
Centre for Medieval Studies, who are transcribing the 1561 census into a data-
base using FileMakerPro 7™. Previously, a team of three undergraduates did
the same with the less-detailed 1562 “presentation copy.” Each entry is given a
unique identifying number that will allow it to be linked to Cartesian XY co-
ordinates. This process is close to completion.
The second component of the project, which has already begun, is the ap-
plication of the census data to the geo-referenced map via a process called
geo-coding. The mapping team consists of the lead research assistant and a
graduate student in the University of Toronto’s School of Architecture, both
of whom are trained in GIS software. Geo-coding is the process of applying
Cartesian XY coordinates to each census entry and then placing these entries
in geographic space on the map. After collaborative discussions with inter-
ested parties at the University of Chicago and the University of Sydney, it was
decided that a “representational accuracy” was more desirable in this process
than a strict “geographical accuracy.” As a result, rather than drawing indi-
vidual points for each entry on the map and then linking the census data to
those points, the mapping team has developed a means to auto-generate XY
data for each entry based on the descriptions of the route followed by the cen-
sus takers. Each quarter of the city is given its own “layer” in the map in this
process, allowing researchers to segregate data in a variety of ways and accord-
ing to a variety of criteria.
While older maps for cities such as Rome have been geo-referenced, these
are not accurate in a useful way and contain nowhere near the level of detail as
the Buonsignori.3 The DECIMA project has the distinction of working with
one of the oldest, most detailed maps yet to be geo-referenced, and the team is
applying quantitative data to it that is older than that employed in other, simi-
lar projects. The University of Victoria’s Map of Early Modern London takes an
older (1560s) woodcut map (the Civitas Londinium or “Agas Map”) and overlays
literary texts, and topographical and prosopographical information, while the
Locating London database adds late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ma-
terials (like Old Bailey Court Records) on an eighteenth-century map. The
 Special Issue • The Digital Turn: Notes 159

Buonsignori Map and the 1562 census have already been paired in one existing
research tool, the ‘“Online Gazetteer of Sixteenth Century Florence” prepared
by R. Burr Litchfield in conjunction with the ACLS Humanities E-Book Flor-
ence Ducal Capital, 1530–1630.4 As a visual supplement to his text, Burr Litch-
field superimposed a grid of eighty-seven equal squares on to the map, and
noted occupational data for each. Zeroing in on a particular square opens an
image that gives a quick summary of the census data for that set of streets, with
links back to Burr Litchfield’s narrative text. The DECIMA Digital Map of
Renaissance Florence moves a step beyond the static “Online Gazetteer” in al-
lowing direct access to data at the level of individual houses and households,
incorporating more demographic and economic data from the Census Ricerca,
and increasing interactivity by giving access to the underlying databases. In
this way, DECIMA is more flexible, informative, and dynamic. More than
that, it aims to offer more than simply visual access to a fixed field of data.
This innovative interdisciplinary tool aims for the kind of revolutionary
field-altering thrust provided by David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-
Zuber’s computerization of the 1427 Florentine Catasto tax census. DECIMA’s
Digital Map of Renaissance Florence is envisioned as a resource that will be
expandable into the future. In its next stage, it will be a tool for the ongoing
accumulation of material by scholars in different disciplines, chiefly history,
art history, literature, and music. That is, researchers will not only be able to
download it for their own use, but also will be able to add their data to it in such
a way that the map continues to accumulate new layers of data and so steadily
expands as an evermore sophisticated and useful research tool. The methods
and standards for adding or aggregating data will be drawn up in advance, al-
lowing for flexible decisions to be made by an institutional curator. In this way,
the current researchers and host will initiate a dynamic collaboration that will
continue evolving into the future with the needs and contributions of new sets
of researchers.

Notes
1. The Principal Investigator is Nicholas Terpstra, and the Lead Research Assistant
is Colin Rose, both of the Department of History at the University of Toronto. The other
research assistants who have contributed materially to the project include Edoardo Fabbro,
Leah Faibisoff, Daniel Jamison, Duncan Sabiston, and Elisa Tersigni, all of the University
of Toronto.
2. See Trkulja.
3. See Hypercities Beta 2.
4. See http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/florentine_gazetteer. See also Litchfield.
160 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies  •  13:4

Works Cited
Burr-Litchfield, R. Florence Ducal Capital, 1530–1630. New York: ACLS Humanities E-
Book, 2008. Accessed 1 Nov. 2012. <http://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.90034.0001.001>.
———. Online Gazetteer of Sixteenth Century Florence. Providence: R.B. Litchfield, 2006.
Accessed 1 July 2013.
Hypercities Beta 2. Accessed 1 July 2013. < http://hypercities.ats.ucla.edu/>.
Locating London’s Past. Version 1.0. Accessed 1 July 2013. <http://www.locatinglondon.
org>.
Map of Early Modern London. Accessed 1 Nov. 2012. <http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/>.
Trkulja, S.M., ed. I Fiorentini nel 1562: descrizione delle Bocche della città e stato di Firenze
fatto l’anno 1562. Firenze: Archivio di Stato di Firenze, 1991.

CATCOM:
A Database on Performances of Spanish Classical Theater

Teresa Ferrer Valls

T he research group DICAT (http://www.uv.es/dicat/index_en.html) has

been working for almost twenty years on the creation of research instru-
ments that will enhance scholars’ knowledge of Early Modern Spanish theater
through the use of digital tools that create new ways to combine and apply
data.1 The database Diccionario biográfico de actores del teatro clásico español
(DICAT) (Ferrer Valls) was the result of work done during nearly fifteen years.
The DICAT group created a database with almost five thousand entries, which
document the activity of actors, actresses, heads of companies, and musicians
who worked in Spanish professional theatrical companies during the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. We also included five hundred digitized signatures
and a visual database with two hundred images and videos, together with a
digitalized edition of the unpublished manuscript Confirmación de la Cofradía
de la Novena, which includes the documents and regulations related to the 1634
foundation of the actors’ guild.
The project CATCOM. Database of plays mentioned in theatrical documen-
tation (1540–1700), which we are currently developing, is based on our previous
experience of creating the database DICAT. It is important to point out that
Spanish theatrical documentation is exceptionally abundant, especially if
we compare it to other European countries of the early modern period. We
find a lot of documents regarding contracts between actors and the heads of
the companies; contracts with the lessors of the playhouses; contracts with