The Venice Time Machine

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.