Parcels of Venice

key details

20 February 2025
Online on Zoom
3pm — 5pm (CET)

about

This is a project founded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and led by the EPFL, designed to facilitate the exploration of historical sources related to Venice.

The platform’s search engine allows users to find names, places, urban functions, and other data drawn from various primary and secondary sources, including census data, historical cartography, and trade annuaries across a broad chronological span. Each information is verifiable and traceable within the extraction process. The published datasets are accessible to both the scholarly community and the public for reuse in specific studies. The platform is designed to be incremental, allowing for the addition of new datasets and citations.

The course will cover the technical background, methodologies, and development choices, presenting datasets and analyses conducted by scholars on urban morphology and city functions. A follow-up workshop aimed at young researchers will focus on data analysis and interpretation.

The lesson will be held in English.

Lecturers

Frédéric Kaplan

He is the director of the College of Humanities at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He also holds the Chair of Digital Humanities and is President of the Time Machine Organisation, a non-profit association of over 600 institutions. He is the author of a dozen books, translated into several languages, and over a hundred scientific publications.

Isabella di Lenardo

She is a researcher at EPFL’s Digital Humanities Institute, specializing in Art History, Digital Humanities, and Digital Urban History. She focuses on the circulation of artworks and historical cartography. Leading the Time Machine Unit at EPFL, she uses AI and digitization to explore Europe’s cultural heritage. She is the PI on European projects and co-PI on the SNFS-funded “Parcels of Venice” project.

Paul Guhennec

He is a post-doctoral researcher in the Digital Humanities Laboratory at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland). His research focuses on the usage of new computational methods for architectural history, and their epistemological implications. He recently finished his doctoral dissertation on Venice’s urban history, with a focus on vernacular domestic architecture.

Manuel Ehrenfeld

He is a software engineer at EPFL. He is the founder of Non-linear, a design studio specializing in visual communication and digital development. He lectures in Communication Design at IULM University and teaches Computer Graphics at Brera Academy. With extensive experience in front-end development, he has led projects for prestigious events and brands, pioneering in digital innovations and interactive design. Fluent in multiple languages, he is based in Geneva, Switzerland.

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Venice Long Data: A New Platform for the Consultation and Analysis of (Long) Historical Data

Dendrogram on the materials preserved by the State Archives of Venice
The diagram shows the place of emigration (left) and the sestiere of settlement within Venice (right)
Number of galleys sailing along the four main Venetian trade routes during the years covered by the first part of the research
Bubble chart representing all deliberations of the Serenissima Senate on "citizenship"

key details

28 June 2022
Online on Zoom
4pm — 6pm (CET) 

Reference

  • Ca' Foscari University of Venice
  • UDELAR Montevideo | Universidad de la Republica Uruguay
  • Università di Parma
  • Ateneo Veneto
  • EPFL | École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne

about

Guido Caldarelli and Alessandro Codello present Venice Long Data (VLD), an interdisciplinary research project that aims to address historical analysis from an integrated point of view, in the Venetian context, based on the historical database of the State Archives of Venice (ASVe) and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, using techniques from Big Data analysis, Machine Learning, Complex Networks and generally related to quantitative modelling.
The approach aims to study history from a MACRO perspective, complementary to the MICRO perspective usually conducted, always starting from the original sources and using the most modern techniques available to deal with the transcription and analysis of historical sources.
The dual scope of the VLS project is to obtain a historical meta-database representing a fully searchable interconnected digital version of the ASVe and, above all, to create the basis for a quantitative study of the history of Venice, Europe and the Mediterranean.

Lecturer

Guido Caldarelli

Full Professor of Theoretical Physics at Ca’ Foscari University (Venice), and a LIMS Fellow. He graduated in Statistical Physics at Sapienza University (Rome) and holds a PhD from SISSA in Trieste. After Postdocs in Manchester and Cambridge, he became firstly “Research Assistant” at INFM and secondly “Primo Ricercatore” at ISC-CNR where he is still working. From 2012 to 2020 he has been Professor at IMT Lucca. In 2019 he was one of the founders of SIFS. Since 2018 he has been the President of the Complex Systems Society and since 2016 he has been on the board of the SNP Division of European Physical Society.

Alessandro Codello

He is Principal investigator of the Venice Long Data project & adjunct professor at UDELAR Montevideo (Uruguay). He is also visiting scholar at SUSTECH Shenzhen (China).
He holds a PhD from THEP Mainz (Germany). Before, his post-doctoral research activity was carried out mainly at CP3-Origins SDU Odense (Denmark) and at SISSA Trieste (Italy).