The Venice Time Machine
Event details
| Date | 17.11.2015 |
| Hour | 12:15 › 13:00 |
| Speaker | Dr Frédéric Kaplan, Digital Humanities Lab (DHLAB) |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Abstract :
The Venice Time Machine is an international scientific programme launched by the EPFL and the University Ca’Foscari of Venice with the generous support of the Fondation Lombard Odier. It aims at building a multidimensional model of Venice and its evolution covering a period of more than 1000 years. The project ambitions to reconstruct a large open access database that could be used for research and education. Thanks to a parternship with the Archivio di Stato in Venice, kilometers of archives are currently digitized, transcribed and indexed setting the base of the largest database ever created on Venetian documents. The State Archives of Venice contain a massive amount of hand-written documentation in languages evolving from medieval times to the 20th century. An estimated 80 km of shelves are filled with over a thousand years of administrative documents, from birth registrations, death certificates and tax statements, all the way to maps and urban planning designs. These documents are often very delicate and are occasionally in a fragile state of conservation.
In complementary to these primary sources, the content of thousands of monographies have been indexed and made searchable.
The documents digitised in the Venice Time Machine programme are intricately interweaved, telling a much richer story when they are cross-referenced. By combining this mass of information, it is possible to reconstruct large segments of the city’s past: complete biographies, political dynamics, or even the appearance of buildings and entire neighborhoods. The information extracted from the primary and secondary sources are organized in a semantic graph of linked data and unfolded in space and time in an historical geographical information system. The resulting platform can serve for both research and education. About a hundred researchers and students collaborate already on this programme. A doctoral school is organised every year in Venice and several bachelor and master courses currently use the data produced in the context of the Venice Time Machine. Through all these initiatives, the Venice Time Machine explores how “big data of the past” can change research and education in historical sciences, hopefully paving the way towards a general methodology that could be applied to many other cities and archives.
More information : http://vtm.epfl.ch
Short biography:
Prof Frederic Kaplan holds the Digital Humanities Chair at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) and directs the EPFL Digital Humanities Laboratory (DHLAB). He conducts research projects combining archive digitisation, information modelling and museographic design and working recently with the Archivio di Stato, the fondation Cini, the Marciana in Venice, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Bibliothèque Nationale Suisse, the Bodmer Foundation, the Musée de l’Elysée. He also participated to exhibitions in several museums including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Frederic Kaplan published more than a hundred scientific papers and 6 books. He is the chief editor of Frontiers in Digital Humanities and co-directs the Digital Humanities book collection at EPFL Press. He created the first Digital Humanities Master course in Switzerland and is now taking an active role for shaping a complete new curriculum at EPFL. He was the co-local organizer of the Digital Humanities 2014 conference in Lausanne, the largest scientific meeting ever conducted in this domain.
The Venice Time Machine is an international scientific programme launched by the EPFL and the University Ca’Foscari of Venice with the generous support of the Fondation Lombard Odier. It aims at building a multidimensional model of Venice and its evolution covering a period of more than 1000 years. The project ambitions to reconstruct a large open access database that could be used for research and education. Thanks to a parternship with the Archivio di Stato in Venice, kilometers of archives are currently digitized, transcribed and indexed setting the base of the largest database ever created on Venetian documents. The State Archives of Venice contain a massive amount of hand-written documentation in languages evolving from medieval times to the 20th century. An estimated 80 km of shelves are filled with over a thousand years of administrative documents, from birth registrations, death certificates and tax statements, all the way to maps and urban planning designs. These documents are often very delicate and are occasionally in a fragile state of conservation.
In complementary to these primary sources, the content of thousands of monographies have been indexed and made searchable.
The documents digitised in the Venice Time Machine programme are intricately interweaved, telling a much richer story when they are cross-referenced. By combining this mass of information, it is possible to reconstruct large segments of the city’s past: complete biographies, political dynamics, or even the appearance of buildings and entire neighborhoods. The information extracted from the primary and secondary sources are organized in a semantic graph of linked data and unfolded in space and time in an historical geographical information system. The resulting platform can serve for both research and education. About a hundred researchers and students collaborate already on this programme. A doctoral school is organised every year in Venice and several bachelor and master courses currently use the data produced in the context of the Venice Time Machine. Through all these initiatives, the Venice Time Machine explores how “big data of the past” can change research and education in historical sciences, hopefully paving the way towards a general methodology that could be applied to many other cities and archives.
More information : http://vtm.epfl.ch
Short biography:
Prof Frederic Kaplan holds the Digital Humanities Chair at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) and directs the EPFL Digital Humanities Laboratory (DHLAB). He conducts research projects combining archive digitisation, information modelling and museographic design and working recently with the Archivio di Stato, the fondation Cini, the Marciana in Venice, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Bibliothèque Nationale Suisse, the Bodmer Foundation, the Musée de l’Elysée. He also participated to exhibitions in several museums including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Frederic Kaplan published more than a hundred scientific papers and 6 books. He is the chief editor of Frontiers in Digital Humanities and co-directs the Digital Humanities book collection at EPFL Press. He created the first Digital Humanities Master course in Switzerland and is now taking an active role for shaping a complete new curriculum at EPFL. He was the co-local organizer of the Digital Humanities 2014 conference in Lausanne, the largest scientific meeting ever conducted in this domain.
Practical information
- General public
- Free
- This event is internal
Organizer
- EESS - IIE
Contact
- Prof. Anders Meibom, LGB