Capturing Change
Creating an Online Platform to Analyze Venetian Commerce
Mission Statement
Our mission is to provide a web-application tool that visualizes and analyzes trends in Venetian Commerce over time by organizing archival data provided by the Venice Project Center (VPC). We have deployed a platform that future collaborators will be able to iterate on to help assess Venice's economy.
Mission Objectives
Consolidate data that was previously collected on Venetian stores
Design and test a comprehensive and flexible web-application
Analyze archival WPI data on Venetian commerce
Plan for the future of the web application
Welcome!
Hello! On behalf of the 2020 Venice Shops team, welcome to our project website! We are a group of four interdisciplinary students from WPI and as you may have already seen from the title page, our team has been working diligently for the past 4 months to create a web application that would help local Venetians and researchers alike in visualizing the history of Venetian commerce. This website houses all of our work. In the top right you will find links to our executive summary, presentation, report, technical addendum, deliverables, and team files which contain data we have collected over the course of our project. Below you will find a blog that chronicles our project experience and highlights major milestones we were able to achieve.
If you would like to hear about our efforts first hand, make sure you click on the "Presentation" in the top right to watch a recording of our final presentation to our sponsors. For more information please email gr-ve20-comm@wpi.edu.
If you are interested in other work that has been done in Venice, please make sure to visit the Venice Project Center and check out all the other projects that have been done over the past 30 years by our fellow peers!
Team Blog
September 3, 2020 First PQP Meeting
Our group had our first PQP meeting with our project advisors, Prof. Fabio and Prof. deWinter. They discussed their expectations for us throughout the term, helped us understand our project, and addressed any questions we had.
-Taylor Ostrum
September 15, 2020 First introduction draft
Our team submitted the first draft of our project introduction. We are hoping for positive feedback and constructive criticism from our advisors.
-Nathan Morin
September 18, 2020 First Sponsor Meeting
Today, my team and I met with our sponsor liaisons for our project, Daniele Scarano and Filippo Rossi. Both were extremely helpful and they shared shop data collected from previous years that we'll need to organize, and comb through to update it and make sure there are no duplicates. Any gaps in the data will let us know what type of information we will need to try to gather this year.
-Lucas Fernandes
September 23, 2020 First background draft
Our team submitted the first draft of our background for review. The process of putting this background together enlightened our group on the state of Venice's economy, its dependence on tourism, and how COVID-19 has affected Venice as a whole.
-Nathan Morin
September 24, 2020 Fourth PQP Meeting
Prof. Carrera gave us an interesting tip on how to collect current store data in Venice remotely. He suggested we get in touch with the Citizen Science team and their sponsors to get people "in the field" (on the streets in Venice) to collect data for us. This is something that as a group we will need to discuss further but it is a promising idea.
-Kavim Bhatnagar
October 1, 2020 Fifth PQP Meeting
During the meeting today our team presented our final presentation draft for the first time as well as showcasing our plans for our final project deliverables and our proposal skeleton.
-Taylor Ostrum
October 7, 2020 Meeting with Citizen Science Team
Today our team met with the Citizen Science team to learn more about the similarities of our projects as they will be working on the InputApp and CKConsole which we will be potentially using for hosting our data and collecting new entries.
- Lucas Fernandes
October 8, 2020 Sixth PQP Meeting
Our team presented our final presentation draft again and discussed the direction of the project concerning the data collection process.
-Kavim Bhatnagar
October 13, 2020 Submitted Final Proposal Draft
Today we submitted our final proposal draft for ID2050!
- Nathan Morin
October 22, 2020 First Week of IQP
Today marked the first day of our IQP term after having a short break. We met with Professors Carrera and deWinter as well as our sponsors, Daniele and Filippo. We discussed what our first objective is for the next couple of weeks and are excited to get started!
-Taylor Ostrum
October 30, 2020 Second Week of IQP
This week we focused on looking at past project team's datasets. There is a ton of data, and we are using a google sheet to organize it all. We are going through and making sure every year is consistent. It's tedious work but we are looking forward to being able to see the trends in the data.
-Kavim Bhatnagar
November 5, 2020 Third Week of IQP
More data reorganization. We realized some years had shops with missing latitudes and longitudes, so we used the Izitoli app to find that information. We also had to use google maps to get the addresses of some shops. We started identifying each shop by a NACE code so that we can know how many different store types there are.
-Taylor Ostrum
November 13, 2020 Fourth Week of IQP
This week, after making significant progress with our data consolidation, we decided to focus on organizing all of the images for the shops. We categorized them into different google folders so that future teams can easily access them. We also spent time organizing
-Nathan Morin
November 21, 2020 Fifth Week of IQP
Just finishing up with data organization. We discussed our final report with Prof. deWinter and Prof. Carrera and decided that a booklet report might be our best option. We spent some time looking at the Melbourn booklet for inspiration and started formatting our paper.
-Lucas Fernandes
November 24 , 2020 Update before Thanksgiving
We finally finished reorganizing and consolidating the data! We are so relieved it's finally done, and we're excited for this much needed thanksgiving break.
-Kavim Bhatnagar
December 3, 2020 Sixth Week of IQP
We met with Prof. deWinter and Prof. Carrera to go over our final presentation, and they suggested we reorder our slides, so we spent this week getting our presentation ready for class tomorrow. We also made a lot of progress with the web-app thanks to help for Daniele and Filippo and we are excited to see it up and running very soon.
-Lucas Fernandes
December 9, 2020 Day before Final Presentation
Today is the last day before our final presentation! We met with Professor Carrera and deWinter one last time to go over any changes to our presentation. Tomorrow is the big day!!!!
-Taylor Ostrum
December 10, 2020 Final Presentation!!!!!
We presented today!! It went really well. Our presentation was able to spark some interesting converstions and our sponsors along with Professor Carrera and deWinter seemed happy with the work we were able to complete over the past seven weeks. We are all finally relieved that the presentation is over and that it wen well.
-Nathan Morin
December 11, 2020 Finishing Up
Today, we had our final Zoom meeting with the other Veniec IQP teams and Professor Carrera and deWinter. We will spend today tidying up our Google Drive, making sure our website is up to date, and finishing up our final presentation.
-Lucas Fernandes
December 12, 2020 Submitted our Final Report!
Today we submitted our final report to Professor Carrera and deWinter. If they approve it, they will give us the go ahead and submit it to WPI, at which point we will be done with IQP!!! It was awesome working together with everybody on the team these past 7 weeks and we are proud of what we were able to accomplish!!!
-Kavim Bhatnagar