CIRCA:Venice Time Machine Project

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The Venice Time Machine project officially begins with an initial agreement signed on February 23, 2013, between Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Ca ’Foscari University. For this signing, the Italian Minister of Education and Research, Francesco Profumo, as well as the Swiss Secretary of State for Education, Research and Innovation, Mauro Dell’Ambrogio, make the trip to Venice, thus highlighting the collaboration within the context of good Switzerland-Italy relations.
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The Venice Time Machine project officially begins on February 23, 2013, with an agreement signed between Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Ca 'Foscari University. The Italian Minister of Education and Research, Francesco Profumo, and the Swiss Secretary of State for Education, Research, and Innovation, Mauro Dell'Ambrogio, travelled to Venice for the signing, underlining the partnership within the framework of excellent Switzerland-Italy ties. EPFL and Ca'Foscari University have established a combined training programme in the form of regular autumn schools: the partners have arranged joint activity weeks. The goal of these training workshops, which are attended by students from EPFL and Ca'Foscari University as well as young researchers from other European and American institutions, is to establish multidisciplinary training around archive material and new technologies.
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A joint training program between EPFL and Ca’Foscari University is set up, taking the form of regular autumn schools: joint activity weeks were organized by the partners. The objective of these training courses, attended not only by students from EPFL and Ca’Foscari University but also young researchers from several other European and American institutions, is to develop interdisciplinary training around archival material and new technologies.
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*2014:  
*2014:  
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The State Archives, Ca’Foscari University and EPFL sign a first formal collaboration document framing a joint program of actions for the future. The aim of the project is to transform the documentary heritage of archives into an online information system that is available online for the community of researchers and specialists, but also for the general public. The agreement specifies that “the digitization of ancient documents is an essential step for the conservation and enhancement of cultural heritage, two of the fundamental missions of archives.” And that “digital images .. make research possible worldwide allowing thus the creation of ambitious international projects.” The text continues: “For these projects to be carried out, it is important to create a freely accessible database of images of documents associated with related instruments and records of archival descriptions.” Finally, to avoid any ambiguity, the agreement specifies: “In addition to viewing the images, it will be possible to download them in accordance with standards of the Code of Cultural Property and Landscape“. The objective of the project is as “helping the Venice State Archives to make rapid progress in the digitization of the documents it stores and in making these documents available to the international research community.” It is for this reason that the images will be “distributed globally with an open license.”
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The State Archives, Ca'Foscari University, and EPFL sign a first official partnership document outlining a future plan of action. The project's goal is to convert the documentary history of archives into an online information system that is accessible to the community of academics and professionals, as well as the general public. According to the agreement, “the digitization of ancient documents is an essential step for the conservation and enhancement of cultural heritage, two of the fundamental missions of archives.” And that “digital images .. make research possible worldwide allowing thus the creation of ambitious international projects.”“For these projects to be carried out, it is important to create a freely accessible database of images of documents associated with related instruments and records of archival descriptions.” the statement adds. Finally, in order to prevent ambiguity, the agreement states that: “In addition to viewing the images, it will be possible to download them in accordance with standards of the Code of Cultural Property and Landscape“. The project's goal is to “help the Venice State Archives to make rapid progress in the digitization of the documents it stores and in making these documents available to the international research community.” As a result, the photographs will be “distributed globally with an open license.”
The EPFL provides the scanners, servers, computers and all the necessary equipment for the creation of a first digitization space to be installed within the State Archives of Venice. A pre-study phase in close collaboration with the archivists takes place from June to September 2014 in order to test the performance of the digitization chain, primarily in terms of speed in accordance with the categories of documents considered. On the basis of this preliminary study, the choice of series and the configuration of the teams would be established. On June 2014, the official inauguration of the digitization center takes place in the presence of Patrick Aebischer (President of EPFL), Carlo Carraro (Rector of Ca’Foscari), Raffaele Santoro (Director of ASVe) and Thierry Lombard (main sponsor of the project).  
The EPFL provides the scanners, servers, computers and all the necessary equipment for the creation of a first digitization space to be installed within the State Archives of Venice. A pre-study phase in close collaboration with the archivists takes place from June to September 2014 in order to test the performance of the digitization chain, primarily in terms of speed in accordance with the categories of documents considered. On the basis of this preliminary study, the choice of series and the configuration of the teams would be established. On June 2014, the official inauguration of the digitization center takes place in the presence of Patrick Aebischer (President of EPFL), Carlo Carraro (Rector of Ca’Foscari), Raffaele Santoro (Director of ASVe) and Thierry Lombard (main sponsor of the project).  
EPFL hires and trains five Italian specialists for the operations of the scanners and the annotation of digitized documents, as well as a qualified team leader with a paleography and archival background (trained by the school of archival and internal paleography in the Archive): Fabio Bortoluzzi. Among this team, one of the archivists will join the State Archives of Venice a few years later, and Fabio Bortoluzzi himself will go on to become director of the Vicenza State Archives.
EPFL hires and trains five Italian specialists for the operations of the scanners and the annotation of digitized documents, as well as a qualified team leader with a paleography and archival background (trained by the school of archival and internal paleography in the Archive): Fabio Bortoluzzi. Among this team, one of the archivists will join the State Archives of Venice a few years later, and Fabio Bortoluzzi himself will go on to become director of the Vicenza State Archives.

Revision as of 23:22, 30 November 2021

Venice Time Machine Project

Contents

What is Venice Time Machine?

In 2012, the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the Ca' Foscari University of Venice unveiled the Venice Time Machine. The aim of this project is to transform the ‘Archivio di Stato’ – 80 kilometres of archive materials chronicling every facet of Venetian history over the last 1000 years (containing maps, monographs, manuscripts, and sheet music)– into an open-access database.

Thanks to European Commission financing, this initiative has now been expanded to dozens of locations around Europe as part of a broader project called Time Machine. Time Machine fosters a one-of-a-kind collaboration of prominent European academic and research institutions, cultural heritage institutions, and commercial businesses. Coordination of efforts in recent years has resulted in the formation of the Time Machine Ecosystem, which now includes over 300 organizations from 34 countries. This organization's Venice becomes a local time machine project.

Archivio di Stato

(Venice time machine, Wikipedia)

Its purpose

  • The project intends to establish a Big Data of the Past by tracing the transit of news, money, commercial commodities, migration, creative and architectural trends, and so on. Its completion would constitute the greatest database of Venetian documents ever compiled.
  • It promises not only to make reams of buried history available to historians, but also to allow them to examine and cross-reference the data, due to breakthroughs in machine-learning technology.
  • If it is successful, it will open the way for an even more ambitious initiative to link comparable time machines throughout Europe's ancient cultural and commercial centres, exposing in unparalleled detail how social networks, trade, and knowledge have grown across the continent over centuries. According to Kaplan, who runs the Digital Humanities Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, it would act as a Google and Facebook for generations (EPFL).

(Venice time machine, Wikipedia)

Who create it?

  • In 2012, EPFL, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, and The State Archives of Venice established the Venice Time Machine Project.
  • The project is directed by Frederic Kaplan. He presently serves as the Chair of Digital Humanities at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). He is the director of the EPFL Digital Humanities Institute (DHI), which consists of five research laboratories. He is also the Time Machine Organization's president.
  • Major Venetian patrimonial organisations are also involved in this effort, including The Marciana Library, The Instituto Veneto, and The Cini Foundation.
  • The project is currently supported by the READ (Recognition and Enrichment of Archival Documents)European e-Infrastructure project, the SNF project Linked Books and ANR-SNF Project GAWS.
  • Renowned academics from Stanford, Columbia, Princeton, and Oxford make up the international board. The Lombard Odier Foundation became a financial partner in the Venice Time Machine project in 2014.

(Venice time machine, Wikipedia)

History:

  • 2013:

The Venice Time Machine project officially begins on February 23, 2013, with an agreement signed between Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Ca 'Foscari University. The Italian Minister of Education and Research, Francesco Profumo, and the Swiss Secretary of State for Education, Research, and Innovation, Mauro Dell'Ambrogio, travelled to Venice for the signing, underlining the partnership within the framework of excellent Switzerland-Italy ties. EPFL and Ca'Foscari University have established a combined training programme in the form of regular autumn schools: the partners have arranged joint activity weeks. The goal of these training workshops, which are attended by students from EPFL and Ca'Foscari University as well as young researchers from other European and American institutions, is to establish multidisciplinary training around archive material and new technologies.

  • 2014:

The State Archives, Ca'Foscari University, and EPFL sign a first official partnership document outlining a future plan of action. The project's goal is to convert the documentary history of archives into an online information system that is accessible to the community of academics and professionals, as well as the general public. According to the agreement, “the digitization of ancient documents is an essential step for the conservation and enhancement of cultural heritage, two of the fundamental missions of archives.” And that “digital images .. make research possible worldwide allowing thus the creation of ambitious international projects.”“For these projects to be carried out, it is important to create a freely accessible database of images of documents associated with related instruments and records of archival descriptions.” the statement adds. Finally, in order to prevent ambiguity, the agreement states that: “In addition to viewing the images, it will be possible to download them in accordance with standards of the Code of Cultural Property and Landscape“. The project's goal is to “help the Venice State Archives to make rapid progress in the digitization of the documents it stores and in making these documents available to the international research community.” As a result, the photographs will be “distributed globally with an open license.” The EPFL provides the scanners, servers, computers and all the necessary equipment for the creation of a first digitization space to be installed within the State Archives of Venice. A pre-study phase in close collaboration with the archivists takes place from June to September 2014 in order to test the performance of the digitization chain, primarily in terms of speed in accordance with the categories of documents considered. On the basis of this preliminary study, the choice of series and the configuration of the teams would be established. On June 2014, the official inauguration of the digitization center takes place in the presence of Patrick Aebischer (President of EPFL), Carlo Carraro (Rector of Ca’Foscari), Raffaele Santoro (Director of ASVe) and Thierry Lombard (main sponsor of the project). EPFL hires and trains five Italian specialists for the operations of the scanners and the annotation of digitized documents, as well as a qualified team leader with a paleography and archival background (trained by the school of archival and internal paleography in the Archive): Fabio Bortoluzzi. Among this team, one of the archivists will join the State Archives of Venice a few years later, and Fabio Bortoluzzi himself will go on to become director of the Vicenza State Archives.

  • 2015

The protocol for digitization, metadation and annotation is established by the team leader and the archivists of the Venice State Archives on the basis of the results of 2014’s pre-study phase. An estimate of the number of hours is produced for the digitization and description of various documents series. On the basis of these estimates, it is decided to carry out a basic description of the registers and to concentrate efforts on searches facilitating the automatic extraction of information. In July 2015, the first version of an annotation software is deployed within the State Archives. 2015 is also a period of intensification of the collaboration between the EPFL teams and the other Venetian institutions. Several parallel projects are launched. The “Garzoni” project – a partnership between EPFL, the University of Lille (Valentina Sapienza) and the University of Rouen (Anna Bellavitis), funded by the Swiss National Fund and The French National Agency for Research – aims to build an information system in order to conduct historical research on the question of learning from the perspectives of the economy, family, gender, art and architecture. It focuses on the “Gustizia Vecchia” collections, which had already been digitized by the University of Lille in partnership with the State Archives, and is coordinated by Maud Ehrmann for EPFL, involving a dozen other researchers. A second project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, Linked Books, begins on September 1, 2015. The project explores the “history of history” of Venice using new algorithmic approaches, based on networks of citations and full-text analyzes of publications. The project is coordinated by Giovanni Colavizza and Matteo Romanello and concerns a corpus of more than 2,000 monographs and 5,000 newspaper articles published over the past 200 years and dealing with all aspects of Venetian history. For this project, several specific contracts are established to supervise the digitization of the collections of secondary sources necessary for the project, notably with the Marciana Library, the Istituto Veneto and the Ca’ Foscari University Library. Finally, also in 2015, EPFL and the Giorgio Cini Foundation signed an agreement for the launch of the Replica project, coordinated by Isabella di Lenardo which aims to digitize the foundation’s photo library (one million images) and to build an engine for research enabling the search for morphological patterns. The agreement specifies that the digital photo library and the search engine will be open access. A new type of scanner is developed by Adam Lowe’s team at Factum Arte. It is designed as a rotary table that moves continuously during a scanning session, simultaneously photographing both sides of documents on a page and automatically uploading the images to a computer. The project will also give rise to a doctoral thesis by Benoit Seguin who will propose a new way to train neural networks using deep learning to detect recurrences of patterns on media as diverse as drawings, paintings, engravings or photographs.

  • 2016

EPFL begins its participation in the READ project in January 2016 to accelerate progress in handwriting recognition. Venice Time Machine is one of the large-scale demonstrators of the project. On the EPFL campus in Lausanne, a new building designed by Kengo Kuma, Artlab, is inaugurated in November. A permanent exhibition on the Venice Time Machine is presented in the “Datasquare” pavilion. Director Raffaele Santoro is interviewed several times and his explanations are presented on the pavilion screens, along with other testimonials from historians and researchers working on the project.

  • 2017

In 2017, EPFL makes the problem of sharing images via the network more effective with the creation of a first version of the Time Machine Box. It is a server, installed at the location of scanning, that is to say directly at the archives, on which all the scanned documents and their metadata are hosted and easily accessible via the IIIF protocol, which defines international standards on image exchange. The Time Machine Box is not a simple storage space. It allows any research organization to perform an analysis on the images present to perform an analysis using document segmentation algorithms or handwriting recognition, presuming these are compatible with the IIIF standard. In October of the same year, EPFL, Ca’ Foscari University and the State Archives of Venice and the Giorgio Cini Foundation, publish a joint press release which will give rise to several articles publicly announcing the first results of the project and of the digitization campaign, including 190,000 digitizations of archival documents, 720,000 photographic documents, 3,000 books covering 200 years of Venetian historiography, making a total of more than 2 million digitized images. On this basis, 160,000 manual transcriptions of name, location and keywords were performed by archivists. A search engine using a handwriting recognition system based on these annotations is announced. To mark this occasion, Michele Bugliesi, the Rector of Ca’ Foscari University declares: “The digitization of archival holdings opens up new avenues for the study and understanding of the history of the cultural evolution of past and contemporary civilizations. With this project, Venice is at the forefront of Europe, demonstrating the enormous potential that digital technologies offer for the enhancement of cultural heritage and their ability to develop research methods in the fields of history, art history and more generally for research in the humanities and socio-economic sciences.”

  • 2018

In June 2018, a joint research center established between the Cini Foundation, Factum Arte and the DHLAB of EPFL is inaugurated. The center is named ARCHiVe – Analysis and Recording of Cultural Heritage in Venice and is funded by the Helen Hamlyn Trust. As planned, an automatic handwriting recognition system is developed from the annotated Venetian documents within the framework of the European READ project. The results obtained by researcher Sofia Ares Oliveira at EPFL are very encouraging: the recognition performance of this system exceeds the reading skills of an Italian person without archival training. The system is presented for the first time in Mexico City at the Digital Humanities 2018 conference. The same summer, a generic document segmentation system (dhSegment), initially developed to solve the segmentation problem of the Replica project, is also made available open-source. In just a few months, this free and open system will be used by dozens of archives around the world, including the National Archives in Paris. The search engine, announced in 2017, combining text search, visual search and geo-historical navigation to allow efficient access to the sources of the Venice State Archive and the Cini Foundation, is unveiled to the public during the Time Machine 2018 conference. Indeed, EPFL and Ca’ Foscari University become founding members of a project submitted to the European Commission for the establishment of a “European Time Machine”, along with 31 other European institutions. Thanks to the extraction methodologies and open technologies developed, the Venetian model can now be exported as a generic format to understand the past of European cities. A large exhibition at the Venice Biennale of Architecture presents the project in the Padiglione Venezia.

  • 2019

The pan-European Horizon 2020 Time Machine Coordination and Support Action is funded by the European Commission. The number of supporting partners continues to grow and reaches more than 400 institutions, confronting Europe’s challenge to build an open database of information that has thus far been segmented into silos. The Venice Time Machine now becomes one among 20 others Local Time Machines. EPFL wins the Parcels of Venice project to continue research on Computing methodology to extract information from cadastral sources.

  • 2020

EPFL publishes results based on newly collected and digitized daily death records, or necrologies, from the city’s Patriarchal Archives in the open-access Nature Research journal, Scientific Reports. The article uses data science techniques to analyze the spread of the bubonic plague, which is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, in Venice between 1630 and 1631. The team observed that the deaths appeared to follow a novel pattern: a first peak in 1630 that reached over 400 deaths per day at its worst, followed by a less acute, but longer-lasting, peak in 1631. They note that this is the first description of such a “long tail of high mortality” in the literature on the subject.

(EPFL website)

Technology

The State Archives of Venice have a large amount of hand-written paperwork in languages ranging from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Over a thousand years of administrative papers, ranging from birth registrations, death certificates, and tax statements to maps and urban planning drawings, are housed on an estimated 80 kilometres of shelves. These papers are frequently brittle and in a precarious condition of conservation. The variety, quantity, and precision of Venetian administrative documentation are unparalleled in Western history. By merging this wealth of data, significant swaths of the city's history may be reconstructed, including detailed biographies, political dynamics, and even the look of buildings and entire neighbourhoods.

The Venice Time Machine process

Scanning

Paper documents are turned into high-resolution digital pictures using scanning devices. The scanning technology that may be used and the speed at which a document can be scanned vary depending on the kind of document. In conjunction with industry, EPFL is developing semi-automatic, robotic scanning technology able of digitizing roughly 1000 pages/hour. Several of these machines will be built in order to provide an effective digitization pipeline dedicated to ancient manuscripts. Another technique being researched at EPFL involves scanning books without turning the pages. This method makes use of X-ray synchrotron radiation. Video about scanning technique: https://youtu.be/XwwuhCd-CqM

Transcription - Information extraction

The automated reading of antique handwritten texts is a significant problem. Common character-recognition software enables printed books to be read letter by letter despite font variances, making them searchable. This, however, does not work for handwritten texts, since the forms of letters might vary greatly across scribes and alter with time. A European Union collaboration called Recognition and Enrichment of Archival Documents (READ) is developing several techniques to solve the challenge, including employing machine learning to detect the forms of complete words. The computers can convert photos into likely words. The photos are automatically divided into sub-images that might represent words. Every sub-image is compared to the others and categorized based on the form of the word and its properties. Every time a new word is transcribed, millions of other word transcripts in the database are identified.

Connecting data

The true value of the Venetian archives is found in the interconnectedness of its documents. The data taken from these many sources is structured in a semantic network of connected data and unfurled in time and space as part of a historical-geographical data system based on high-resolution scanning of the city itself. These algorithms look for recurring patterns in hand-written paperwork, maps, paintings, and musical scores, collecting data about individuals, locations, and artworks to create a massive network of connected data. The information gathered from the texts is carefully intertwined and connected together into massive graphs. By merging this level of data, it is feasible to reconstruct huge chunks of the city's past while simultaneously allowing for the emergence of new knowledge.

Video about connecting data: https://youtu.be/meZBwbWwRkc

4D modelling

4D multiscale geohistorical simulator and procedural methods for reconstructing possible pasts compatibles with digitized sources. ​​ A sample of 4D modelling: https://youtu.be/f8JVLPwmMF4

Phase

The efforts are organized in several consecutive phases of increasing scale:

  • Phase I (2012-2019): The State Archive in Venice, The Marciana Library, The Instituto Veneto, and the Giorgio Cini Foundation were among the key Venetian patrimonial organisations involved in Phase I of the project (2012-2019). The READ European eInfrastructure project, the SNF project Linked Books, and the ANR-SNF Initiative GAWS all provided funding for the project. Scholars from Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, and London Universities serve on the project's worldwide advisory board. Three hundred researchers and students from many disciplines (Basic Sciences, Engineering, Computer Science, Architecture, History, and Arts History) have already contributed to the initiative. Every year, a doctoral school is held in Venice, and various bachelor and master courses already make use of the project's data.
  • Phase II (2020-2028): emphasis on creating the Venice Mirror World, a 4D representation of Venice that overlaps the city itself, directly linking the knowledge of its history for those who must determine its destiny.

Venice is only the beginning point. The Venice Time Machine has applied, together with collaborators around the Europe, to be one of the European Union's next billion-euro key initiatives. If it succeeds, it will build time machines in other places with significant archives and connect them.

(EPFL website)

Suspended

The project was halted in September 2019 owing to an overlook in the initial agreement signed in 2014.

Penzo Doria, the current head of the State Archive of Venice, believes that "these data are unusable" from an archive standpoint since the digitization work did not adhere to the InterPARES (International Research on Permanent Authentic Records) project's preservation requirements. These rules necessitate the meticulous capture of information that proves the origin of each document, as well as the storage of such information in the metadata that comes with each file. This acts as an electronic signature, ensuring the long-term preservation and validity of a digital content. According to Penzo Doria, the EPFL researchers who performed the scans did not record how they obtained such information – or, if they did, they did not share this evidence with archive employees.

According to Kaplan, the researchers have gathered metadata. Their technique, however, was based on a distinct set of regulations - the International Council on Archives' ISAD (International Standard Archival Description) principles. He claims that the EPFL researchers followed the protocols provided by the State Archives staff. Kaplan further stated in an e-mail in February 2019 that he gave metadata material to Penzo Doria's predecessor, Giovanna Giubbini. Nature claimed that Penzo Doria and Giubbini had never received these materials.

Meanwhile, the destiny of 8 gigabytes of digital material collected from around 190,000 papers over the previous 5 years is unknown. Nothing has been updated after that suspension.

(Davide, 2019)

References

Abbott, A. The ‘time machine’ reconstructing ancient Venice’s social networks. Nature 546, 341–344 (2017). https://doi-org.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/10.1038/546341a

Albertin, F., Astolfo, A., Stampanoni, M., Peccenini, E., Hwu, Y., Kaplan, F., & Margaritondo, G. (2015). X-ray spectrometry and imaging for ancient administrative handwritten documents. X-Ray Spectrometry. https://doi.org/10.1002/xrs.2581

Davide Castelvecchi. (2019, October 25). Venice ‘time machine’ project suspended amid data row. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03240-w

Kaplan, F. (2015). The Venice Time Machine (p. 73). https://doi.org/10.1145/2682571.2797071

Venice time machine. (n.d.). Name. Retrieved October 25, 2021, from https://www.epfl.ch/research/domains/venice-time-machine/

Contributors to Wikimedia projects. (2021, August 20). Venice time machine. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venice_Time_Machine

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