Deliverables

Interactive Historical Timeline:

The team sought to create an accessible, comprehensive, and expandable digital application about the history of Venice. After some research, the team decided that the best way to do this was through the creation of a digital interactive timeline. By looking at other web-based timelines, the team was able to decide what functions and features the application should have. Some of these features, such as the timebar, zoom capability, search capability, and content panels can be seen in the figure below. To create this application the team used several coding languages, including HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Application Website: history.veniceprojectcenter.org

Parsing L'Atlante storico di Venezia and Enciclopedia storica di Venezia:

This first version of the site has been populated with basic entries of historical events taken from several sources: L’Atlante storico di Venezia and L’Enciclopedia storica di Venezia, books given to us by their author, Giovanni Distefano. L’Atlante is an extensive chronology of dated events, year by year, while L'Enciclopedia is an enciclopedia about Venice. Both sources provided basic building blocks for the material in the timeline. Through the use of a parsing algorithm and some manual work, the team was able to extract events, locations, and images from L’Atlante and additional descriptions from L’Enciclopedia. Populating the application with these sources made it a comprehensive site, which was one of the main goals of the project. Below is an image that describes the parsing algorithm process for L'Atlante storico di Venezia:

Democratizing Venetian History:

The application allows its users to democratize the history of Venice by allowing them, and not a textbook or scholar, to determine which events are interesting and important. In the timeline, each event keeps track of the number of times it has been viewed. As the application is used events “float up” from lower zoom levels based on their popularity. A visualization of event movement can be seen in the figure below. This functionality allows the users to decide which events of history are most important, a feat which has not been achieved by historical sources to date.