Venice Time Machine
The Venice Time Machine (dt. Venice Time Machine ) is an international project in 2012 from the polytechnique Ecole fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the University of Venice has started. The aim is to collaboratively build a multi-dimensional model of Venice using digitized documents from around 1000 years of city history , which is publicly accessible and researchable. The project is a showcase project of the Digital Humanities , as it combines many of the methods developed in the context of this subject in dealing with the digitized cultural heritage.
Lore
From over 1000 years of city history, around 80 running shelf kilometers with documents have come down to us. Most of it is kept in the Venice State Archives in a former monastery next to the church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari . In total, the archive material is stored in over 300 rooms: books, manuscripts, rolls of wills, notes, city maps, cadastres and the like. The seamless transmission of the sources was also possible because the Republic of Venice was able to maintain its independence for over 1000 years - it was not occupied by Napoleon until 1797 during the Italian campaign .
Project organization
The focus of the work is the automated digitization of the documents. Meanwhile, u. a. Specially made scanners are used, which are also suitable for misshapen documents. For the future it is also planned to digitize books page by page with the help of X-ray scanners without opening them. The basic possibility for this is due to the fact that a large number of the documents were written with iron gall ink , the metallic components of which absorb the X-rays. However, this technology is not yet fully operational.
Since most documents are handwritten, the next step is to use automatic handwriting recognition to make the scans machine readable and searchable. The Transkribus platform is used for this .
EU flagship project
In 2016, the project applied for the status of a flagship project of the European Commission , for which a ten-year term and a budget of one billion euros each were planned. So far, there have only been three such projects, including none with a historical-cultural orientation like the Venice Time Machine. However, in May 2019 it became known that the flagship projects would not be continued in this form.
Discrepancies between project partners
On September 19, 2019, the Venice State Archives announced that it would stop its cooperation with EPFL. The reason given was that the goals and methods had never been agreed. On September 23, EPFL responded with a statement and complained that it had not been informed about the stop in advance. At the end of October 2019, the positions were clarified again in the journal Nature . Gianni Penzo Doria, the new director of the State Archives since September 1, 2019, claims there that the eight terabytes of data digitized over the past five years from a total of around 190,000 documents are unusable from an archival point of view because they do not meet archival standards. The general future of the project is not yet in question, currently (as of December 2019) the project partners are negotiating.
literature
Manfred Dworschak: In no time at all. In: Der Spiegel 3 (January 12, 2019), pp. 100-103. ( online )
Web links
- Project website
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b See Dworschak 2019. ( online )
- ↑ The EU gives up the concept of flagship programs. In: NZZ, May 15, 2019. ( online )
- ↑ Venice 'time machine' project suspended amid data row. In: Nature, October 25, 2019. ( doi : 10.1038 / d41586-019-03240-w )
- ↑ Urs Hafner: The time machine is broken. In: NZZ on Sunday, December 15, 2019. ( online )