They say history is write by the victors , but we have just as much , if not more , to learn from the unsuccessful person . Now anew archival projectaims to do just that , digitalize and linking more than a thousand eld of handwritten artifacts from the life of ordinary people .
TheVenice Time Machineis the brainchild of calculator scientist Frédéric Kaplan , director of the Digital Humanities Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne ( EPFL ) . It was 2012 when Kaplan first visited Venice ’s Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari . The knightly friary had been converted to historical archives , and its 300 + rooms were stuffed to the gills with stacks upon stacks of books , roll mapping , and yellowed , disintegrate documents . Kaplan ’s head speed .
" I matt-up entirely overwhelmed , " hetoldNature . " ascertain what a thousand - yr archive look like , knowing that most of it was not available — I live we needed to do it . "
For help , he tap his co - director Isabella di Lenardo , who say she was more than willing to assist . " It was what I had been waiting for all my life . "
Over the next few twelvemonth , Kaplan , di Lenardo , and an army of other researchers and archivists go for toscan and digitizethe archive ’s walls and wall of diachronic information . procession in optic recognition software should make it potential to learn and log the handwritten schoolbook of each small-arm of newspaper , which , in round , should make it possible to make an immense , searchable database of fiscal records , dying certificates , letter , mapping , and more .
Joan Rosés is an economical historiographer at the London School of Economics and Political Science . He says record book from the financially turbulent metropolis " could assist change our understanding of how fiscal securities industry work . " And having access to ordinary multitude ’s paper , he says , could literally change the shape of history . " you’re able to deduce a sight of stunned things if you only study successful , celebrated people — the only people that we know a batch about . "
The projection could be a secret plan - changer for researchers of all form .
" We are in a state of electrified excitement about the possibilities , " said Lorraine Daston of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin . " I am practically salivate . "
[ h / tNature ]
