This article was taken from the August 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Computer scientist Frédéric Kaplan wanted to visit the Venice of 1014. So he built a virtual time machine -- a digital reconstruction of La Serenissima using architectural, historical and demographic data stretching back over a millennium.
Within Venice's state archive lies enough data to fill 80km of shelf-space -- a cache of books, letters, maps, drawings, birth and death certificates from 1014 onwards. "The goal is to transform this mass of documents into an information system -- indexed, searchable and visually represented," says Kaplan, who works at the
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) and is partnering with Venice's Ca' Foscari University. Over the next decade, Kaplan's team will use scanners, transcription machines and text mining to build an open-access database. From this, the researchers will create a Google map that anyone can manipulate to visualise the city's architectural growth over time. There will also be a "Facebook of the past", says Kaplan, that publicises the lives of historic Venetian residents.
For Kaplan, it's the fusion of history with technology that makes the research rewarding: "It's the long-view perspective on information," he says. Next up is training historians to use his techniques to reconstruct other places. "We need to foster a new generation of digital humanists, capable of dealing with these 'big data' of the past."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
