Abstract
Why did some places become protestant whereas others remained catholic as a result of the European Reformation? To find large-scale patterns across these places, I operationalise the territory of a ruler, since, in the 16th century, he was the one choosing the denomination for his subjects. However, operationalisation is challenging because territories were complicated structures. In this article, I critically discuss the operationalisation of territories. I identify the main historical characteristics of territories and describe how they could be optimally operationalised. I show that the implementation of this optimal approach is currently infeasible due to data scarcity and a large number of assumptions. As an alternative, I present a simplified operationalisation based on vectorised surface geometries. Despite its historical inaccuracy, I show that this simplified operationalisation enables ecologically valid interpretations of neighbourhoods and the analysis of small localities for which the corresponding ruler and his denomination are unknown. The article highlights the need for a diversity of operationalisations and proposes future directions on how data should be gathered to improve the historical representations of territories.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Geographical Research in the Digital Humanities |
| Subtitle of host publication | Spatial Concepts, Approaches and Methods |
| Editors | Finn Dammann, Dominik Kremer |
| Place of Publication | Bielefeld |
| Publisher | De Gruyter |
| Pages | 151-194 |
| Volume | 8 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 27 Feb 2024 |
| Externally published | Yes |