Political Territorial Control through Time

This project's main aim is to propose a data model to encode control of land over time and propose an interactive interface to explore and search in a given control dataset. Interface accessible here.

As a practical case study, we will create a dataset for political territorial control relationships in Switzerland from 1000 to today based on the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland (DHS).

Data Model

The data model should englobe the following aspects of political control:

• generic polities at all level of the control ladder (small lordships, administrative subunits, duchies, etc...)
• different modes of control relationships (simple control, shared control, contested, etc...)
• events delimitating control relationships (date, duration, description)
• sources, references and how to document polities, relationships and events
• uncertainty and ongoing discussions on polities, relationships and events in poorly documented times

folders structures

• BFS_geometries/: code to prepare the territories geometries from 1848 municipalities geometries from the swiss Bundesamt Für Statistik (BFS).
• BFS_hist_list_communes/: code to prepare the control relations in Switzerland 1848-present from the historicized list of municipalities of BFS.
• DHS_communes/: code to scrape DHS pages of municipalities
• political_control/: data model for political control
• web/: web interface related code