+ Venice Time Machine and READ – new article in Nature journal

Last week’s issue of Nature carried a fascinating article on the work of Venice Time Machine project at  the Digital Humanities Lab, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).  This initiative is one of the READ project partners and it is working to digitize, annotate and index a huge cache of documents from 1000 years of Venetian history.

The article explores the Venice Time Machine as a large-scale collaboration between archives, historians and digital humanities scholars who are applying digital techniques to process these records – including building a huge digital scanner that can digitise images that are as large as 4×7 metres!  It also sheds light on how Handwritten Text Recognition technology from the READ project is being used to enable the processing and searching of handwritten text.  The Venice Time Machine hopes to take us back to the past by reconstructing the events and networks of this enchanting city.

Article: Abbott, Alison, ‘The ‘time machine’ reconstructing ancient Venice’s social networks’, Nature, 14 June 2017

SHARE THIS ARTICLE

Recent Posts

July 3, 2024
News, Transkribus
Some Transkribus projects finish with a complete digitised collection in Transkribus. Some take that digitised source and use it to ...
June 12, 2024
News, Transkribus
When you think of Carolingian (or Caroline) minuscule, Charlemagne and his vast Carolingian empire likely come to mind. While the ...
May 14, 2024
Uncategorized
Understanding historical documents is key to understanding history. But understanding historical documents in Polish can be a challenge. Not only ...