Florentia Illustrata.
Digital Mapping and Techniques of Visualizing the Pre-modern
Italian City

a workshop organized by Niall Atkinson (University of Chicago), Nicholas
Terpstra (University of Toronto), and Jan Simane (Kunsthistorisches
Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck Insitut)
17 June 2013

Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max-Planck-Institut
Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai - Via dei Servi 51 - 50122 Firenze

The recent emergence of digital technologies that allow for the
spatialization of historical knowledge has the potential to radically
transform and augment the historical investigation of pre-modern cities.
Scholars whose work relies on demographic, institutional, descriptive,
artistic, and architectural sources have begun to use digital
geo-spatial technologies not only to organize and visualize their data
in new and innovative ways, but also to link that historical knowledge
to the multiple data sets that can be embedded within
dynamically-constructed temporal and spatial maps of the city to which
they belong. In this way each researcher can build custom research
environments, as well as demonstrate evidence for scholarly arguments
that draw from an ever-increasing number of digital "layers" in time and
space.

Such a project was originally conceived by historian Nicholas Terpstra
(University of Toronto), whose team has been mapping highly detailed
demographic information from a 16th-century census of Florence into a
cartographic digital archive. One of the long-term goals of this is to
provide ways in which a range of diverse historical projects can be
mapped onto this "base layer" and rendered in both temporal and spatial
dimensions. Such a geo-spatial archive, one that is built over time
through a dialogue between interested parties, would provide the means
by which individual researchers and teams could input, link, compare,
and compute the large amounts of data that such digital technologies
allow. For example, several current projects are developing ways of
mapping out familial topographies through the locations of burial tombs,
the spatial relationships of convents throughout the city, and the
visualization of the Florentine soundscape through the temporal mapping
of the daily ringing schedule of the commune's bells. Through such
interventions, new questions can be asked of traditional texts, objects,
structures, groups, and phenomena. As a virtual inter-disciplinary forum
it would integrate linguistic and graphic information, link communities
and objects to specific topographical spaces, and embed a wealth of data
into the historical remains of the city.

In light of these ambitious goals, as well as the relative novelty of
such data computation for scholars in the humanities, an international
workshop will be held at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz -
Max-Planck Institut on 17 June 2013. We are interested in inviting a
range of scholars, both experts in the digital humanities and those who
are interested in exploiting its research potential, to participate in
the workshop to discuss strategies and methodologies of digitally
excavating, mapping, and reconstructing the literary, social, artistic,
and built remains of pre-modern Italian cities in order to develop novel
ways of interpreting the past.


Programme

09.00
Introduction
Niall Atkinson (Chicago)

09.20
DECIMA (Digitally Encoded Census Information Mapping Archive)
Nicholas Terpstra (Toronto)
Colin Rose, Space, Social Networks, and Behavioural Patterns in the
Decima Granducale
Leah Faibisoff, Motives and Methodologies of the Decima Granducale,
1561: Walking the Streets with Census Takers
Daniel Jamison, Neighbourhoods at Street Level: Tenants and Landlords in
the Decima Granducale

10.15
Family Tombs and the Topographies of Death
Anne Leader (Atlanta)

10.45
Co-Evolution of Politics, Economics and Kinship in Renaissance Florence,
Venice and Genoa
John Padgett (Chicago)

11.15
pausa caffè

11.45
Firenze Città Nobilissima: Topography and Representation
(http://www.khi.fi.it/en/bibliothek/projekte/citta_nobilissima/index.html)
Jan Simane (Florence)

12.15
Per un atlante digitale di Firenze: l'interazione tra fonti documentarie
e fonti iconografiche
Amedeo Belluzzi and Gianluca Belli

12.45
pranzo


14.30
Commitment, Conversion and Conflict: Convent Foundation and Urban
Development in Renaissance Venice
Saundra Weddle (Springfield, MO)

15.00
Orbis Urbis - Navigating through Rome in Space and Time
Martin Raspe (Rome) / Georg Schelbert (Berlin)

15.30
Visualizing Venice
(http://visualizingvenice.org/)
Caroline Bruzelius/Victoria E. Szabo / Mark J. Olson (Durham, NC)
Donatellla Calabi (Venice)
Andrea Giordano (Padua)

17.30
Hidden Florence: A Digitally Triggered Location-Based Tour in an
Augmented Reality Environment
Fabrizio Nevola (Bath)
David Rosenthal (Edinburgh)
Participants are invited to bring their mobile phones and join an on
site demonstration of this app, scheduled for release in May 2013

19.30
Reception
Casa Morrill (Villa I Tatti) or Casa Zuccari (KHI)