Scanners unveil the history of Venice, warts and all
The city-state of Venice enjoyed immense power and wealth for more than 1000 years. A free city, it attracted people of every race, religion, culture and skill, which made it a lively centre of art and innovation. Venice was the main trading port and link between Europe and the East.
Over its long history, Venice maintained a well-ordered bureaucracy that kept detailed records of just about everything that happened in the city and around the Mediterranean. Napoleon put an end to the Venetian republic in 1815 and moved the city’s vast archives into a 14th-century building known as the Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. The building has 300 rooms and 80 kilometres of floor-toceiling shelving.
For years, historians with access to the Venetian archive ran its books through automatic bookreading machines. These machines scan a page every second or two before turning the page for the next scan.
But these days, the ambitious, young Swiss Frederic Kaplan has launched a project to run the complete Venetian archive through state-of-the-art intelligent scanners. Whether these are books, maps, monographs, manuscripts, centuries of newspapers, sheet music, letters, business transactions, painting, or travellers’ logs, the new machines produce several thousand of highdefinition images per hour.
Every image is digitised and the machines automatically annotate and index each archival item. Readers can find a name in one document, then ask the system to find that name in all other manuscripts kept in the database.
Kaplan and his peers at a Venetian university label this project The Venetian Time Machine.
The archives contain details of every boat and its cargo that ever came or went into Venice’s harbour, and every alteration to every building and canal. There are death and patent registers, medical and notary records, and mundane details of ordinary people’s lives – the artisans, traders, shopkeepers, rich and poor, the successful and the unsuccessful.
In the 13th century, capitalism was arguably invented on the Rialto Bridge and, ever since then, notaries have recorded all trading exchanges and financial transactions. The archives contain centuries of reports from European and Ottoman ambassadors, many full of gossip and intrigue, and often written in coded scripts.
The time machine interests not only historians. Economists and epidemiologists are planning to ransack the archives. Economists want study the flow of money and how financial markets and transactions developed. Epidemiologists plan to analyse how the black plague wiped out about half the population of Venice, and how that disease and others spread from door to door.
The newer reading machines are being taught to read handwritten Latin and handwritten Venetian dialect documents, and turn them into digital, searchable text. But Kaplan is going one better.
He is developing a machine that reads unopened books – rather like a medical tomography scanner that builds a 3D picture of the inside of a body, slice by slice.
Seeing The Venetian Time Machine’s success, entrepreneurs and scientists plan to develop similar projects with the Parisian and Amsterdam archives.