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1 1 VENICE TIME MACHINE FREDERIC KAPLAN DIGITAL HUMANITIES LABORATORY
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5 Digital Humanities are inventing new tools to travel not only in space, but also through time.
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6 Can we build “Google maps” of the past ?
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7 Can we build “Facebooks” of the past ?
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8 Can we build time machines ?
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12 The Venice Time Machine is a joint project between EPFL and University of Venice Ca’Foscari.
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13 Why Venice ?
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14 80 km of archives documenting every detail of Venetian history over a 1000 years.
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15 Who lived in this palazzo in 1323 ? How much cost a sea bream at the Rialto market in 1434 ? What was the salary of a Murano glass worker in 1544 ?
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27 900
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28 1000
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29 1100
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30 1200
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31 1300
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32 1400
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33 1500
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34 1600
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35 1700
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36 When can I take a boat if I am in Corfu in June 1323 and what to go to Constantinopoli ? How much will it cost ? What are the risks of encountering pirates ?
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37 Scientific and technological challenges
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38 We can digitize this archive in 10 years with traditional scanning techniques (450 volumes / day)
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39 We are working on new scanning techniques to reach 2000 vol. / day.
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40 Traditional optical character recognition methods have only limited success in transcribing handwritten documents.
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41 The solution is to use precise computational linguistic models of medieval Latin and other ancient languages.
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42 The central scientific challenge of the project is qualifying, quantifying and representing uncertainty and inconsistancy at each step of this process.
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43 This implies not only to model historical information, but to model each step of the construction of historical knowledge.
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44 Our system is based on the notion of “fictional space” (e.g. coherent data coming from a given source, interpreted in a given way)
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45 The crucial moment is when you merge two “fictional spaces” to create a larger data- set.
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46 Our system does not guaranty that you do this fusion in the right manner but document precisely how you do it, enabling to undo the operation if needed.
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47 It also signals inconsistencies between two “fictional spaces” and permits to implement rules to solve them.
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48 Nevertheless, it does not guaranty the convergence towards a single model of the past.
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49 We will not reconstruct the Venice of the past but build a machine for reconstructing all the possible Venices corresponding to different sources and interpretations.
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50 We can
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51 We can
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55 Research in the Humanities is about to undergo an evolution similar to what happened to life sciences 30 years ago.
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56 This evolution is characterized by projects at a new scale, beyond what any single research team can do.
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57 We must foster a new generation of young scientists, through dedicated doctoral, master and bachelor programs.
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58 “Digital Humanists” capable of reconstructing Big Data of the past and exploring Big Data of the present.
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59 dhlab.epfl.ch frederic.kaplan@epfl.ch @frederickaplan
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