L'Italo-Americano

L'Italo-Americano THURSDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2018 www.italoamericano.org 8 ELIZABETH SALTHOUSE S ilence engulfs the double vaulted read- ing room as solitary s cholars pore over ancient scripts. Spi- dery trails of ink scurry across crackling pages. And the friary corridors are lined with nearly 80 kilometers of aged books dat- ing back over a thousand years. But, des pite appearances , Venice's State Archive is at the vanguard of an international pro- gramme to digitize the city's state and domestic documents, from maps to manuscripts, from music to personal papers. The Venice time machine project is extremely ambitious but, when it's finished, it will open up cen- turies of Venetian and European history to researchers and histo- rians around the globe. Let's take a closer look. The A rchivio di S tato di Venezia was founded by the Austrian government in 1815 during a period of rule after Napoleon toppled the Venetian Republic in 1797. It was specifi- cally designed to catalogue and protect the records of the great Venetian Republic and, although the Archive itself is only young, the papers it houses date back to the earliest days of the city, in the 7th century AD. The Archive is one of the largest in Italy and completely priceles s as a repos itory of Venetian records. Many docu- ments used to be housed in the wooden cabinets that gripped the walls of the back room offices in the Doge's Palace at the mercy of damp, humidity and the occa- sional attack from hungry mice. As well as papers relating to the Venetian magistrature and legis- lature, a mammoth collection on its own, the Archive safeguards the paperwork of numerous local institutions, religious bodies, private Archives, personal docu- mentation, diplomatic reports, maps, musical scores and corre- spondence between the Venetian administration, noble families and its various mainland territo- ries. But this isn't just a static, his- torical treasure trove of old doc- uments.The Archivio continues to collect and store documenta- tion from the current provincial administration and is still grow- ing. Over 1200 years of history are encapsulated on spindly, handwritten pages, in some of the first printed pages ever pub- lished and in geographic and artis tic des igns charting the Venetian empire and the explo- rations of its people. The Archive is Venice and decipher- ing the documents is pivotal to understanding Venice and its position in the world. Up until recently, the only way to access the collection was to physically visit the old con- vent building next to the Basilica di S anta M aria G lorios a dei Frari, itself a key location in the city's S an P olo s es tiere, to request the papers you needed. Countless researchers and schol- ars have come to sit in the read- ing room, poring over delicate, irreplaceable old documents searching for clues to long-lost events, people or proceedings. And whether in winter or sum- mer, the task has its own particu- lar drawbacks, as the Archive is not temperature controlled, so mittens or fans can be essential. But times are changing. Over the last few years, tech- nology has begun to open up the library to a wider audience via a digital index and some small- scale scanning projects funded by the Italian government. In 2006, for example, the Archive scanned its prized collection of 3000 maps using a purpose-built scanner, large enough to accom- modate the enormous room-sized charts. After dipping its toe in the digital waters, and seeing the benefits, the Archive is now embracing the new world with the historic Venice time machine project. The people behind the venture are Professor Frédéric Kaplan, a computer scientist who founded and directs the Digital Humani- ties Laboratory at the Swiss Fed- eral Ins titute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzer- land, and co-director Isabella di Lenardo, a Venice-trained histo- rian. Kaplan is passionate about the possibilities of artificial intel- ligence and digital sciences and in 2012 brought together Swiss digital expertise, Venetian histor- ical knowledge and collaborators from the Ca' Foscari University of Venice to digitize the entire library. Their task is immense. In layman's terms, the team plans to scan the contents of over 300 rooms at the Frari Archive. That's over 80 kilometers of books, millions of pages of script and printed text and around 300 volumes of documented history. Instead of just copying the Archive for posterity before the frail leaves succumb to the see- saw attacks of soaring summer temperatures and intolerable humidity, then unrelenting win- ter flooding and freezing, Kaplan and his crew want the computers to actually "read" the documents to make them searchable.That's relatively eas y w ith printed books , as today's character- recognition software can cope with different fonts and text sizes, but it has yet to learn how to interpret handwriting. So, whilst state of the art high-speed scanners robotically turn the pages of books, capturing thou- sands of images every day, a team of archivists is on hand to manually annotate ins cribed texts , to decode diplomatic ciphers and to identify key names, places and other useful facts that can then be used to link records together. Once complete, Kaplan and his team will have created an unrivaled digital dataset focused on Venice that can be searched, cross-referenced, interrogated and interpreted. A four-dimen- sional database will be created empowering historians, scholars and V enetians alike to fly through the virtual doors of palaces and warehouses, through personal offices and courtrooms, through Venice's ancient annals and through time, listening to the long-silenced voices of the peo- ple who lived, traded, travelled, governed and brought up fami- lies there. And still there is more that Professor Kaplan, Isabella di Lenardo and their team want to achieve. Even as V enice's S tate Archive is being mapped, the time machine is enlisting other historical institutions across Europe to repeat the project, gradually stitching together the continent's w ritten his tory. Boffins are working on algo- rithms to finally digitize hand- writing, including in the Venet- ian dialect. A nd others are working on a scanner that can read books without opening the cover to speed up the task. It sounds like science fiction but it's already being done w ith scrolls from the ancient worlds of Greece and Egypt. As quickly as technology is developed, it is improved and superseded; the possibilities it creates are end- less. So now, with the help of uni- versities, archivists and a team of digital experts, the Archivio di S tato di V enezia is finally revealing the everyday details behind the glorious Republic, coloring in the lives of working people and following stories beyond the lagoon out across Europe. From the birth of bank- ing to the spread of trade, from devastating plagues to diplomat- ic machinations , the time machine is unlocking histories, long thought los t, from an Archive that no one person or even team of people could ever hope to read alone. Scholars and historians are eager to interrogate the data and as more and more archives are added, the time machine, that Kaplan describes as a social network linking his- torical people, places and events, will begin to show us the past in four dimensions. And maybe, jus t maybe, by bringing the Venice of the past to life once more, we will learn how to shape our future. Surely, that's time travel at its very best? a The Archivio di Stato di Venezia contains 1200 years worth ofl documents related to the city and its history. Today, many of them are available for digital con- sultation © Thomas Jurkowski | Dreamstime.com NEWS & FEATURES TOP STORIES PEOPLE EVENTS Digital time travelling in Venice

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