Structuring Resources for a Database of Balkan Criminality in the Long Nineteenth Century

This paper discusses the preparation stage of an interdisciplinary database repository that is meant to document and enable the analysis of hajduk criminality in the long nineteenth century. The repository’s scope is to provide a documentary framework for the concept of “literary factuality”, but its envisaged applications extend beyond cultural studies to domains such as geo-informatics (GIS) or spatial humanities. At the crossroads of mapping, geo-referencing, and literary studies, the concept of “factuality” is illustrated with toponymic data exclusively, but the matter is organised with a view to the development of a broader Balkan criminality database that has been originally sampled with case studies from Romanian Principalities. Extracted and processed manually, semi-automatically or AI-assisted, the non-literary data originate in both various printed sources (historical, archaeological, juridical, toponymic, etc.) and cartographic materials (Austrian and Russian maps of the early nineteenth century, as well as new maps) that were meant to anchor traditional literary analysis in a quantitative methodological approach. In order to show how open-access datasets can be used we applied the buffering method and explained how its results can be interpreted and used further. Structured in CSV and GeoJSON files, open data will enable researchers to create digital maps with various thematic foci and to unveil, by means of reconstruction and visualization, nineteenth-century life forms that otherwise would remain textually-bound.