Big Data of the Past, from Venice to Europe

In 2012, the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the University Ca'Foscari launched a program called the Venice Time Machine, whose goal was to develop a large-scale digitisation program to transform Venice's heritage into 'Big Data of the Past'. Millions of register pages and photographs have been scanned at the State Archive in Venice and at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini. These documents were analysed using the deep-learning artificial-intelligence methods developed at EPFL's Digital Humanities Laboratory in order to extract their textual and iconographic content and to make the data accessible via a search engine. The project has now expand to a European scale, including more than 500 institutions and 20 new cities jointly constructing a distributed digital information system mapping the social, cultural and geographical evolution of Europe. The project build upon existing platforms such as Europeana, and accelerate their development. While Europeana drives transformation throughout the cultural heritage sector with innovative standards, infrastructure and networks, Time Machine aims to design and implement advanced new digitisation and artificial intelligence technologies to mine Europe's vast cultural heritage, providing fair and free access to information that will support future scientific and technological developments in Europe.