OpenHistoricalMap/Projects/Holy Roman Empire

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OpenHistoricalMap/Projects/Holy Roman Empire - Other languages

Status: In progress, recruiting helpers & team members

About

For almost 1000 years, the Holy Roman Empire held together a crazy patchwork of kingdoms, principates, and transformed Europe as we know it. In addition, attempts to map this patchwork have created what are possibly the most intricate boundary maps the world has ever seen.

The primary goal of this project is to create a high temporal and spatial resolution evolution of the Holy Roman Empire. While this will show some expansion and contraction over time, this map will likely show an ever-shifting composition of the empire over time.

A secondary goal of this project is to assemble a team of volunteers to work with a shared purpose and coordination on a large-area, boundary-focused mapping effort.

Snippet of Droysen Heiliges Römisches Reich 1400

Humbly ; ), this project is going to build the best, coolest, most zoom-able, linked to open data, most impressive map of the Holy Roman Empire on the web. The list of Holy Roman Empire states has around 1700 rows. If you account for boundary changes requiring multiple relations for each state, it easy to imagine that the entire history of the HRE might involve over 2500 boundary relations. So, if you're into mapping and 1-5,000 piece puzzles, this is the project for you!

Approach

The general strategy here – which is open for discussion and adjustment – is this:

  1. Put up a sample approach and hope that people with more expertise and prior mapping experience on the Holy Roman Empire will correct it.
  2. Email prior mappers and invite them to review this approach.
  3. Assume that there already are quite a few HRE relations on OHM.
  4. Agree on shared tagging standards and baseline quality bar for this multi-hierarchy empire.
  5. Identify missing HRE elements and divide the work among interested mappers.
  6. Create chronology relations whereever possible.
  7. Invite others to drill down into detail to map additional elements per HRE entity.
  8. Ensure that all OHM elements – chronology relations - are represented in associated Wikidata entries with OHM relation ID property (P8424) statements.

Team Members & Coordination

Requirements

  • A desire to learn how to work with borders and border relations.
  • Willingness to use / learn JOSM for editing in OHM. Nothing against iD, but JOSM is much better suited to work with large-area boundary mapping.
  • An interest in working with Wikidata.
  • Patience, patience, patience. We're likely to make mistakes, so we'll need to make many revisions.

Volunteers

To sign up, please just add your name here and start

Coordination

There's a project tracking Google spreadsheet here. I hope that's ok, as it seemed a bit unwieldy for a Wiki, but we can certainly transfer it somewhere else if it's not workable for the team.

Mapping steps

  • Sign up for the states they'd like to map
  • Double-check that the state doesn't already exist in OHM
  • If so, record the relation link and flag it for validation.
  • If not, map away, and then record the relation number & link, and flag it for validation by marking "Ready" in the Validation column.

Validation steps

  • Ensure all tags are on the relation
  • Verify source tags as being ok for OHM
  • Double-check dates
  • Make sure the relation belongs to the chronology relation for that state, as well as appropriate higher-level relations (e.g. circles) as subareas

Mapping Scope

The primary focus of this project, to start, is on mapping the boundaries of the component states of the HRE.

Yes, you can map a birds-eye view!

Even better, however, would be to map the cities of these states. Or, at a minimum, to map one item... like a castle grounds... per state from the era of that state.

So, the scope might include:

  • Focus: Boundaries
  • Bonus:
    • City / village city points
    • Roads
    • Castle / estate grounds

Tagging standards

See also: Create a TagInfo project page & project file (TagInfo project file documentation).

UNDER DISCUSSION: Boundary relations, other relations, admin_level, and place

A few things are quite clear: admin_level has its limits and the range of administrative relationships in the HRE extends beyond those limits.

Tagging for the renderer is part of the consideration here. Representing the HRE visually is as challenging as representing it logically/topologically. admin_level is one of the primary tags used by our stylesheets to differentiate labels and may be more so in the future. This is contrary to the rule of "don't tag for the renderer" from OpenStreetMap, but is consistent with the practice of doing exactly that in some cases.

We may want to think very carefully about what relations should have an admin_level and what should be modeled without an admin_level. These non-admin_level relationships can be overlapping to whatever degree is required to show their full range of memberships.

Here is one attempt, as a thought exercise - please think about how the Peace of Westphalia changed things and whether those changes should or should not be reflected in our modeling.

HRE Relation Types
type subtype sub-subtype value status example(s) member roles place types & role tags
boundary administrative admin_level 2 empire Holy Roman Empire outer

inner

empire
boundary administrative admin_level 3/4? "more important?" direct reports Austrian Circle subarea

outer inner

Imperial circles; kingdoms(?)
boundary administrative admin_level 4? imperial estates; direct reports to the empire Prince-Archbishopric of Bremen outer

inner

prince-[ electors; archbishops; bishops; abbots; provosts]; imperial [princes, counts, cities] duchies, principalities, counties palatine, margraviates, landgraviates, princely counties
boundary administrative admin_level 6? non-direct reports; non-elector entities County of Ravensberg outer

inner

county
group political
group political Personal_union group of states led by same ruler, but administered independently
group political suzerainty group of states under the protection of a suzerain or leader - outside of the empire as a suzerain itself! (is this a mistake?) Austrian Circle : overSchellenberg : under over

under

`over_name=suzerain`

`under_name=vassal`

group political alliance? group of states with an agreement to work together House of Hohenzollern

Exceptional considerations:

  • Entities with sovereign territory outside of the HRE: create the relationship for the entire entity, but only include the portion inside the HRE as its member.

Notes:

  • Certain types of places might exist at different `admin_level` values. The place type is not an assurance of an position in the imperial hierarchy.

Tagging dates: EDTF is your friend

Please be sure to use EDTF date keys, such as `start_date:edtf` and `end_date:edtf`

For example, because of the way our renderer works, and because we do not want 2 shapes to show up on the same day, we may need to do something like this: 

end_date=1033-04-19
end_date:edtf=1033-04-20

The first date guarantees that on the actual ending date, this entity will no longer be there.

For uncertain and approximate dates, use a `~` after the date. 

start_date=1666
start_date:edtf=1666~
end_date=1700
end_date:edtf=1701~

In the future, we hope to have this automated so that you'll only need to enter 1 start and 1 end date. For now, we'll need it done this way.

Project-specific tagging

Querying for this tag should yield all of the OHM entities involved with the project. 

empire=hre

Source tagging

Appropriately identifying the sources and redistribution policies for OHM-hosted data is critical for its use as a distribution source for consolidated historical GIS information. As such, all ways and relations associated with this import should be marked with the following tags:

Tagging sources

Notes about:

  • Looking for CC0 maps to trace
  • Adding appropriate license tags where necessary & where

`license=CC-1.0` uses the SPDX abbreviation for the Creative Commons CC0 "No Rights Reserved" license.

Wikimedia tagging

Linking objects in OHM to related entities in Wikidata and Wikipedia will enhance the richness of the data in both places and make OHM's data part of a wider fabric of Linked Open Data across the internet.

Wherever possible, please tag all objects with appropriate wikimedia tags: 

wikipedia=en:Austrian Circle
wikidata=Q306390

Project Examples in OHM

Sources

Data

There is a variety of academically-created geodata related to the HRE on the web. Please avoid any viral licenses, such as CC BY-SA or ODbL, and be sure to cite your sources as richly as possible, even if attribution (BY) is not required.

Maps

Old maps are often out of copyright and part of the public domain, so they can be a great source for tracing.

A few examples are listed below in chronological order:

Year Link Author Public domain Georeferenced Mapped
919-1125 https://www.mapwarper.net/maps/82823 William R. Shepherd ✓ ✓ ✓
1378 https://warper.wmflabs.org/maps/6879 Karl Wolf ✓ ✓
14th century https://warper.wmflabs.org/maps/6876 Gustav Droysen ✓ ✓
1400 https://warper.wmflabs.org/maps/6872 Gustav Droysen ✓ ✓
15th century https://warper.wmflabs.org/maps/6874 Gustav Droysen ✓ ✓
~1554 https://warper.wmflabs.org/maps/6875 Gustav Droysen ✓ ✓
1648-1742 https://warper.wmflabs.org/maps/6873 Menke and Merz ✓ ✓
1648 https://warper.wmflabs.org/maps/6877 William R. Shepherd ✓ ✓
17th century https://warper.wmflabs.org/maps/6880 Gustav Droysen ✓ ✓
1736 https://warper.wmflabs.org/maps/6878 William R. Shepherd ✓ ✓
18th century https://warper.wmflabs.org/maps/6882 Gustav Droysen ✓ ✓

...If you know other maps, add them here!

Notes regarding Wikimedia Commons SVG, PNG, JPEG maps

There are plenty of very interesting and detailed maps to be found of Wikimedia Commons. There are two key concerns with these maps that need to be considered when using these as a source for tracing:

  1. Copyright assertions. If you trace a vector map that includes a copyright mark, your derived trace should respect that copyright. You will also, however, need to make an evaluation of whether that stated copyright is valid or respects its sources. For example, a vector map based on an illustration from a book should respect the copyright of that book. Sometimes this is not the case on Wikimedia Commons.
  2. Source assertions. Very often on Wikimedia Commons, there are the following suspicious source claims:
    1. No source cited. Thus, there is no verifiability for the map.
    2. Own work. Thus, you'll find detailed maps of old boundaries with no source references.
    3. Ex-post sourcing. A source added after the creation of the map, sometimes by someone who didn't create the map. Again, it is unclear if this is a valid practice.
    4. Misattribution. Sources that bear no resemblance to the map depicted.

Examples:

Books & articles

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