Towards a Collaborative Cultural Analysis of the City of Rome

Maximilian Schich (Rudolf Wittkower Fellow)

Public Flickr photo density in Rome (left) by locals versus tourists (right, blue to red) 2005 to 2023 (Image: Ksenia Mukhina & Maximilian Schich, 2024, CC-BY)

Public Flickr photo density in Rome (left) by locals versus tourists (right, blue to red) 2005 to 2023 (Image: Ksenia Mukhina & Maximilian Schich, 2024, CC-BY)

The purpose of the project is to explore the state-of-the-art and joint emerging opportunities towards a novel, collaborative, and multidisciplinary understanding of the city of Rome, as imagined, represented, and enacted in historical sources and modern data. Relevant materials include maps and topographic records from the forma urbis to cell phone data, texts from medieval mirabilia to ChatGPT, and images from Renaissance drawings to millions of online tourist photos. The project coincides with several large digitization projects, including the entire BH photo collection and the library’s Rome department, both among the most comprehensive of their kind. Together with the availability of modern sensor and social media data, and recent methods of quantitative aesthetics, network science, machine learning, information visualization, etc., our goal is to jointly capture and harness unprecedented opportunities. In June 2024, the second of two workshops was convened by Prof. Dr. Maximilian Schich, ERA Chair for Cultural Data Analytics at Tallinn University and BH Wittkower Fellow 2023/24, and BH Director Prof. Dr. Tristan Weddigen. Details cf. https://www.biblhertz.it/3395137/ (2023 workshop I) & https://www.biblhertz.it/events/37654/2598514 (2024 workshop II).