The historical cadastral archives are an important source of information to help understand our cultural heritage since they contain a trace of the activities, land uses, and buildings developed by people from different periods. However, in the era of Big Data there remain many historical documents of great value that have not been digitized or studied in depth. This is the case of the cabreves, which are precatastral documents used for centuries in several regions of Spain to document those properties that were subject to the payment of taxes to a feudal lord. Rescuing these data would enable studying the landscape structure of relatively recent dates for which there is no cadastral cartography. However, it is difficult to establish the state of conservation, degree of accessibility, content detail, and quality of the archived cabreves. In recent years, progress has been made in digitizing these sources. In Spain, the Spanish Archives Portal (PARES) harmonizes and unifies the efforts of national archives, and a significant number of documents have been archived in recent years. We use text mining techniques to analyze and map the records in which cabreves appear. Out of the 1,752 records found, a total of 1,408 cabreves have been geocoded and mapped, enabling us to establish which territories and periods can be studied using these sources. From this experience, we request that digital archives maintain a geographical perspective during archival appraisal.1. Select a representative repository for the entire area of study of the Crown of Aragon. Given the great wealth of sources and their diversity, it is necessary to focus this first study on a source that is sufficiently representative. 2. Propose a reproducible and extensible analysis methodology that enables the available information to be easily visualized. This methodology should also be applicable to other repositories or archives. 3. Determine the main characteristics of the cabreves found. It is useful to establish the conservation status, digitalization, possibility of downloading, among other features. 4. Describe the spatial and temporal distribution of the available cabreves. It is necessary that the available cabreves can be shown on maps.
Importance of the cabreves as a source of geographical dataThe cabreves are public deeds linked to the emphyteusis or copyhold lease, the predominant legal formula in the Crown of Aragon -one of the most important crowns of the European Mediterranean and founded in the 12th century. Cabreves are pre-cadastral sources in which the emphyteutic copyholder declares the copyhold (dominium utile) on real estate and land, recognizing the dominium directum of the feudal Lord (Gil Olcina, 2012). The information contained in the cabreves is very detailed when describing the properties of each emphyteutic copyholder with surface size, location, and limits data, as well as annual taxes paid for each of the properties. In many cases, there is a succession of books over time (decades or centuries), which enables historical studi...