From indicative to interpretative maps: Dubrovnik urban fabric in the city councils' deliberations 1400‐1450

This paper aims to prompt the visualisation of the research results within the discipline of art history. The core research is documents of a late medieval commune and its relationship with the urban fabric, which is followed by the development of the methodology of mapping and visualizing the research results.

The documents studied are the Dubrovnik city councils’ deliberations from 1400 until 1450. They are preserved as manuscripts written in Latin. The manuscripts had been investigated during the DUCAC project (Dubrovnik: Civitas et Acta Consiliorum. Visualizing Development of the Late Medieval Urban

Fabric, Croatian Science Foundation, 2014‐2017), which resulted in a collection of 3341 fully transcribed deliberations that reveal the government’s decisions on buildings and spaces in the city. The transcriptions have been published on the project web pages in the form of a map‐searchable database (https://ducac.ipu.hr/project/mapping/). They are organized according to the possibility of locating a building or a space recorded in a document. This database indicates the prospects for further research.

The richness of the data allows further research to be conducted from different perspectives and within different disciplines. In this paper, the research is based on the questions which are formulated within the discipline of art history. They tend to disclose the aspects and the extent of the government control over the urban fabric. The questions are: what buildings were recorded in the deliberations, where they are/or were located and how precise we can be in mapping them, who were the owners and to which social group they belonged, what were the government demands and reasons that stood behind these decisions.

As a case study, the paper prompts further discussions on the methodology of mapping and visualizing the result of the research on pre-modern cities.