Geospatial History Data and Digital Cartography
Pietro Liuzzo, Martin Raspe, Klaus Werner
Digitization of the Rome & Naples Collections
One of the major projects of 2024 was the digitization of the modern books—i.e., volumes published after 1900—on Rome and Naples: the end result was that two collections, comprising almost 12,000 volumes, have been made available for research. The choice of the Rome and Naples collections was determined by the possibilities of combining their contents with our existing internal resources, developed over the last 25 years with projects such as “Zuccaro” or “Ars Roma”, or modern approaches to information gathering and dissemination, such as Roma Communis Patria . While the physical part of the digitization of almost three million pages was carried out in-house by GAP Visio in just ten months, the transcription work was delegated to our partner Read COOP and is still ongoing; the highest priority was given to the digital rendering of the texts in a way that is consistent with our quest to make their content truly accessible for research. Not only will all the illustrations be made available for visual research, but the standardized texts will also be made available for state-of-the-art approaches to summarizing and extracting content using AI tools. A necessary step in this direction—already underway—is the automatic recognition of entities such as art works, monuments, places, and people for a seamless interaction with our already existing research data.
Project coordination: Klaus Werner
Scientific advisory: Elisa Bastianello
Technical support: Margherita Antolini, GAP Visio, Read COOP
BHMPI Object IDs of the Photographic Collection in Wikidata
The digitization of the Rome and Naples collection with the named entities could deliver many potential connections activated programmatically. Given that there is no common connection among the diverse entities represented in the textual, bibliographic, and visual resources of the Digitization Department, the Library, and the Photographic Collection, we took the opportunity to experiment with and test a different approach to connecting resources via Wikidata without losing the richness of the ways in which artists, places, and works of art and architecture have been precisely identified in each project.
Because these entities are often linked with entries in public authority files, it is possible to reconcile all their respective representations; however, the choice of resources to be linked varies. For example, while entities described in digitized volumes are identified by their Wikidata identifier, the same entities when used in the indexing of books are identified by a GND ID taken from the DNB authority file, and again by an object ID when depicted in the Photographic Collection and, when possible, by a GND ID. The Knowledge Graph remains agnostic by design in this sense, meaning that it does not enforce any specific linking policy but supports all of them.
In order to bridge the different domains, the Wikidata platform, whose capacity as an aggregator of links from authority records is well known, was chosen as the data hub; while the GND ID (and, of course, the Wikidata ID) was already present, the object ID used by the Photographic Collection was added with a concerted effort directed at buildings in Rome and L’Aquila. The elegance of this solution lies in the fact that even more external services, most notably data from the Census and the Istituto centrale per il catalogo e la documentazione (ICCD), become accessible via Wikidata. The use of Wikidata as data hub will certainly become more relevant in the near future, with more partner institutions allowing access points to their material on the Wikimedia platforms; for our part, we already plan to extend the effort to add identifiers of objects in the province of Rome and in Lazio.
Coordination: Klaus Werner
Collaboration: Pietro Liuzzo
Collaboration: Margherita Antolini
Aggregation of Information on Roman Monuments
Even prior to the digitization of the Rome and Naples collections, there was a strong interest in showing all the relevant monuments of these two historic cities in their respective urban settings and in bringing all the existing information together on one map. This was especially true because the Institute had collected a wealth of material for each monument—and even more existed “in the wild.” Using Wikidata as a central hub, we were able to aggregate textual resources from digitized rare books, bibliographic resources from the library's Kubikat OPAC, visual resources from the photographic collection, and a variety of external resources — most notably records from the ICCD and Census — to collect as much information as possible for each monument. The geospatial data for the map display was provided by OpenStreetMap, and again the Wikidata properties were crucial in linking monuments to actual buildings. The aggregation mechanism itself is automatic: new information is added as it becomes available on Wikidata. The application illustrates the extra value of adding geospatial dimensions to art historic data and is a preparatory step for the general introduction of geospatial queries in our research.
Lead: Klaus Werner
Digital Historic Maps
Historic printed maps are important primary sources for research, specifically for topographically centered studies that pursue the so-called spatial turn in Art History. This approach is taken in several projects of the Michalsky department, specifically in “Cities and Spaces in Premodernity”, “Naples – Palimpsest”, and “Editing Naples”.
To facilitate the study of digitized historic maps, a viewing environment for annotated historic city maps and panoramas has been created in close collaboration with researchers. It is based on the software “Digilib” that was written from the early 2000s onward in collaboration between the MPIWG in Berlin (Robert Casties) and the BHMPI. The interactive front-end is being actively developed and is constantly evolving. Currently, the system holds high-resolution images of some of the most important historic maps of Naples and Rome. The viewing tool allows for panning and zooming into greater detail; cartographic objects like palaces and churches are highlighted by means of interactive overlay polygons colored by building category. Moving the mouse over a polygon provides the user with the building’s legend entry, more detailed data, and links to other information sources such as the ZUCCARO information system.
The corresponding map database contains the topographical data. All its items are listed in a so-called gazetteer that helps to identify buildings and their intrinsic hierarchy. It also lists references to annotated texts of historic guidebooks. For Naples, there are also ca. 160 digitized hand-drawn maps from different archives that are superimposed onto a modern OpenStreetMap backdrop. This tool supports detailed and historically centered studies of spatial aspects in the relationship between texts, images, and maps.
A major part of the map research environment is formed by the database CIPRO – Catalogo Illustrato delle Piante di Roma Online (Illustrated Catalogue of the Maps of Rome Online). CIPRO contains a comprehensive list of historic maps of Rome, assembled since the early 2000s by Georg Schelbert (now ZI Munich). It not only lists the prototype (i.e., the plate), but also accounts for actual printed copies and their whereabouts. High-resolution digital images (provided by the BHMPI’s Library as well as external partner institutions) are available for many of the listed maps.
The digital maps environment also supports the project “Roma Communis Patria” (Susanne Kubersky) and the online exhibition The Allure of Rome: Maarten van Heemskerck Draws the City.
Lead: Martin Raspe