Towards a Novel Collaborative Cultural Analysis of the City of Rome II

Scientific Organization:

Maximilian Schich (Tallinn University) & Tristan Weddigen (Bibliotheca Hertziana)

2nd WORKSHOP OUTLINE

Previously (https://www.biblhertz.it/3395137/), we brought together experts to outline the state-of-the-art and the joint opportunity space towards a novel collaborative cultural data analysis of Rome, in a classic symposium format featuring a string of lectures and discussions. In the 2nd workshop we will collaborate practically, aiming towards a product that serves as a point of reference for the community, while constituting co-authorship for active participants. Newly available data includes recently digitized material from the Bibliotheca Hertziana library and photo collection. Since last year, Dr. Ksenia Mukhina and Maximilian Schich have further analyzed millions of public images that became available on a major social media platform over the past two decades. This situation enables a novel joint cartography of Rome, in time for 2025, integrating and comparing additional data sources with densities of modern locals vs. tourists, indoor vs. outdoor images, and associated oscillations of attention at time-scales ranging from hours in the day to seasonal patterns in years. For connoisseurs, the preliminary result appears meaningfully in sync with historical sources such as the Nolli map of 1748, while confirming modern individual experience in detail. Covering tourist attention in the first quarter of the 21st century, it would be further compelling to enrich the picture with the coverage of scholarly literature, libraries, foto collections, etc. We note that the full potential includes a set of projections capturing the topography of geolocated objects, yet also the topology of the underlying multidimensional space of image similarity. We anticipate this research to result in a new kind of "Bedeutungsperspektive" (hierarchical proportion) based on logarithmic frequencies, and in fundamentally new statements regarding the canonic stability of Roman points of interest, the latter due to the unprecedented temporal granularity of the available data.

The second workshop is again convened by Prof. Dr. Maximilian Schich, ERA Chair for Cultural Data Analytics at Tallinn University and BH Wittkower Fellow 2023/24, and BH Executive Director Prof. Dr. Tristan Weddigen.

2nd WORKSHOP PROGRAM

The 2nd workshop takes place at Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome (Via Gregoriana) from June 11 to 13, 10:00 to 17:30. Morning presentations are scheduled to occupy 20 minutes + 10 minutes discussion. The afternoons, except for the keynote on day 1, are reserved to fully concentrate on co-creation towards a joint product via Dagstuhl-style discussions and/or ad-hoc working groups based on available data.

Please follow the workshop also online through VIMEO CHANNEL: https://vimeo.com/event/4369454

Tuesday, June 11

DAY 1 – TOPOGRAPHY

10:00–10:30
Maximilian Schich, Tallinn University
Topography, Topology, and Iconology of Rome – An Introduction

10:30–11:00
Ksenia Mukhina, Tallinn University
Two Decades of Tourist Attention Dynamics in Rome

11:00–11:30
Martin Raspe, Bibliotheca Hertziana
Establishing topographic identity: Names, maps, gazetteers

11:30–12:00
Klaus Werner, Bibliotheca Hertziana
Wikidata, OSM and PostgreSQL as Datahub and Geospatial Extension

12:00–13:00 Lunch break (only for speakers)

13:00–15:00
Topical discussion / co-conceptualization
Towards a novel TOPOGRAPHICAL analysis of Rome
[including a summary regarding the status quo of Roman historical maps data]

15:00–15:30 Coffee break

15:30–16:30
Keynote: Luca Maria Aiello, IT-University of Copenhagen
Quantification of the Intangible from Multimedia Data

16:30–17:30 On-site excursion (Palazzo Barberini)

Wednesday, June 12

DAY 2 – TOPOLOGY

9:00 Guided Tour through Bibliotheca Hertziana with M. S. (only for speakers)

10:00–10:30
Petter Holme, Aalto University
Social Physics and Urban Dynamics

10:30–11:00
Guido Caldarelli, Università Ca' Foscari
Networks and Trees from Archives

11:00–11:30
Kathleen Christian & Katharina Bedenbender, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin
The status quo of Census Data: RDF, Geocodes, and Images

11:30–12:00
Alessandro Adamou, Bibliotheca Hertziana
Utilities for harmonizing the geospatial and semantic exploration of religious culture in Rome

12:00–13:00 Lunch break (only for speakers)

13:00–15:00
Topical discussion / co-conceptualization
Towards a novel TOPOLOGICAL analysis of Rome
[including a summary of the status quo of Roman legacy database project availability]

15:00–15:30 Coffee break

15:30–17:30 On-site excursion

Thursday, June 13

DAY 3 – ICONOLOGY

10:00–10:30
Ana Maria Zapata Guzman & Dario Negeruela, Universität Zurich
New Methods for Accessing Visual Open Research Data (VORD)

10:30–11:00
Alexis Culotta, Tulane University
SavingFaces: A Mapping and Investigation of the Renaissance Roman Frescoed Façade

11:00–11:30
Arlene Leis, University of York
Visiting and Visualizing Eighteenth-Century Rome

11:30–12:00
Maximilian Schich, Tallinn University
Summary

12:00–13:00 Lunch break (only for speakers)

13:00–15:00
Topical discussion / co-conceptualization
Towards a novel ICONOLOGICAL analysis of Rome
[including a summary regarding the status quo of Bibliotheca Hertziana Foto Collection and Library Data]

15:00–15:30 Coffee break

15:30–16:30
Topical discussion / co-conceptualization
Towards a novel INTEGRATED analysis of Rome
[including a joint overview of available methods]

16:30–17:30 On-site excursion

Co-authorship & data statement
Contributing will establish co-authorship in the final product, even if it takes a village, which is similar to co-authored group efforts in biology or physics. Our aim is not to re-publish data or to diminish existing platforms, but to raise the importance and traffic of original data sources by providing overviews and meaningful summary statistics, ideally with granular pointer back to the original data. Additional data contributed by individual participants or partner institutions should ideally include granular object ids, image files, and/or metadata including geocodes or other useful multidimensional coordinates. Integrating data, we plan to harness the collection space navigator software, which is open source, open access, and provides for convenient import and export functionality of result images and calculated data coordinates, which can be reused elsewhere. In case contributed data needs further processing, we plan to evaluate the challenge and highlight the inherent opportunity in the community roadmap towards a more comprehensive analysis.

Project purpose and previous workshop
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.

A more detailed project description and last year's program remain available on the 1st workshop website at https://www.biblhertz.it/3395137/.

Acknowledgments

The analysis of millions of social media images by Ksenia Mukhina and Maximilian Schich is supported by the CUDAN ERA Chair project for Cultural Data Analytics (https://cudan.tlu.ee), which is funded through the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program of the European Commission (grant no. 810961).