Mapping and Geocoding, Part 4: Business Directory Data Set

Florists: A Network of Commercial Sites near the City Center and the Grands Boulevards

Primary source.

The French firm Didot–Bottin published an annual business directory for Paris akin to today’s phonebooks.
The directory includes entries for a variety of commercial sites such as florists, horticulturalists, seed sellers, and glasshouse vendors.
I use the entry for “Fleurs naturelles” (florists), in the 1870s business directory, to plot the historical addresses of the shops then in operation. (The entry for “Fleuristes,” cross-listed with “Plumassiers,” gives the addresses for shops specializing in artificial flowers for embellishing women’s hats and clothing.)
Full text searchable digitized volumes and downloadable PDFs of Didot–Bottin’s Annuaire-almanach du commerce, de l’industrie, de la magistrature et de l’administration are available from the BnF’s Gallica database.
The amazing librarians at my university secured an interlibrary loan for a partial run of the directories. (See the ginormous and unwieldy size of each volume in the banner photo for this post!)

Mapping.

I keyed the data from the Didot–Bottin directory into an Excel spreadsheet. My university’s GIS specialist helped me import this data, in another file format, to ArcGIS.
I used the ArcGIS geocoder to match the 40+ street addresses to coordinate values.
Unfortunately, there is no way to convert historical street addresses to contemporary ones. The ArcGIS geocoder attempts to match historical with contemporary addresses, providing a report on the accuracy of the assigned values (match, tie, and no match).
The report for this data set indicates that at least 12 points are problematic.
To increase the accuracy of the points, I am able to sort the data into layers and manually adjust the points as needed.

This screen capture shows the initial mapping–it’s a work in progress!!!