The third volume, the ‘Digitised House Register (Parcels) of Dresden’s Old Town on the Left Bank of the Elbe, 1862’, constitutes the spatial and geodata-based realisation of the overall project. Whilst Volume 1 contains the index cards (Vol. 1, DOI: 10.22000/ug6rug3tss0jn10a) and Volume 2 (Vol. 2, DOI: 10.22000/e6ggwpvy15hpzk55 ) provide the address-book-based concordance, Volume 3 converts this information into a georeferenced parcel model for the year 1862. This enables historical data on houses and property to be directly linked to the urban landscape and made available for cartographic analysis. The volume thus represents the decisive step from digital edition to historical spatial research.
The starting point was Friedrich August Lang’s town plan from 1862 to 1870, which served as the cartographic basis for the area of the Old Town on the left bank of the Elbe. As the surviving mosaic map was only partially georeferenced, the relevant sheets first had to be merged and reprocessed. Due to the profound urban transformation of Dresden, particularly after 1945, georeferencing remains methodologically challenging: suitable control points in the present-day cityscape were in short supply. For this reason, a master plan was additionally drawn up and geolocated in QGIS. The result is generally convincing, even if minor spatial deviations of several metres remain in some areas.
As part of a seminar, the parcel boundaries of the Lang Plan were subsequently digitised through a division of labour. The students took responsibility for individual streets or blocks; their work was then checked, revised and integrated into a single parcel layer. In doing so, the 19th-century cadastral numbers were retained as far as possible, whilst at the same time being supplemented with new identifiers to ensure a clear link to the specialist data. Where historical numbering was missing or conflicts arose due to plot amalgamations, additional technical numbers were assigned. Furthermore, a cross-check was carried out using later town plans, in particular the 1911 map of Dresden, to establish the plot boundaries as precisely as possible.
The academic significance of this volume lies in the combination of topography, property history and digital visualisation. By linking the Hollstein data and the supplemented address book data to specific plots, ownership structures, succession of owners, occupations, social groups and economic functions can be analysed spatially. To this end, a dedicated aggregated dataset was created, which consolidates the information at plot level and prepares it for GIS applications. This makes it possible not only to identify individual houses, but also to reveal larger spatial patterns, such as the distribution of certain occupational groups or the concentration of specific forms of ownership within the urban area.
Volume 3 thus makes the project particularly well-suited for digital historical research. The geodata generated has been converted into standardised formats, published as GeoJSON and integrated into the Digital Map Forum of the SLUB Dresden. This creates a reusable, interoperable dataset that is equally suitable for research, teaching and digital outreach.