Imagine if you could surf Facebook … from the Middle Ages. Well, it may not be as far off as it sounds. In a fun and interesting talk, Frederic Kaplan, Professor in Digital Humanities at EPFL, shows off the Venice Time Machine, a project to digitize 80 kilometers of books to create a historical and geographical simulation of Venice across 1000 years.
The Venice Time Machine, an international scientific programme launched by the EPFL and the University Ca’Foscari of Venice, aims at building a multidimensional model of Venice and its evolution covering a period of more than 1000 years. The project ambitions to reconstruct a large open access database that could be used for research and education. The Venice Time Machine will give the archives a new, virtual existence on the Web. It will reanimate Venice’s past life from them by re-creating social networks and family trees, and visualizing urban development and design. An open digital archive of Venetian treasures will provide an entirely new research environment.
How I Built an Information Time Machine
Lecture by Frederic Kaplan
TEDx Talk – given at TEDxCaFoscariU in June 2013
Imagine if you could surf Facebook … from the Middle Ages. Well, it may not be as far off as it sounds. In a fun and interesting talk, Frederic Kaplan, Professor in Digital Humanities at EPFL, shows off the Venice Time Machine, a project to digitize 80 kilometers of books to create a historical and geographical simulation of Venice across 1000 years.
The Venice Time Machine, an international scientific programme launched by the EPFL and the University Ca’Foscari of Venice, aims at building a multidimensional model of Venice and its evolution covering a period of more than 1000 years. The project ambitions to reconstruct a large open access database that could be used for research and education. The Venice Time Machine will give the archives a new, virtual existence on the Web. It will reanimate Venice’s past life from them by re-creating social networks and family trees, and visualizing urban development and design. An open digital archive of Venetian treasures will provide an entirely new research environment.
Click here to visit the Venice Time Machine website
See also these videos:
You can also follow Frederic Kaplan on Twitter @frederickaplan
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