Time Machine Projects: automated digitization and connection of old docs
March 21, 2019 12:38 PM   Subscribe

"Our common past is the Next Frontier." Time Machine Project builds a Large Scale Simulator mapping 2000 years of European History, transforming kilometres of archives and large collections from museums into a digital information system This sounds futuristic, but this work is an iteration of the Venice Time Machine, which has the goal of analysing 1,000 years of maps and manuscripts from the floating city's golden age (Nature article; short video on YouTube). As previously discussed, machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) can translate tomes of hand-written works, and because some works are fragile, X-ray tomography can "read" through the entire volume of a book, without ever having to open it (short info/demo video on YouTube).

There are a number of related Chinese efforts, linked from a tool developed by an European Union effort titled Communication and Empire : Chinese Empires in Comparative Perspective (Chinese-Empires.eu). That tool is Markus, a tool that, among other features, includes automated tagging and identification of Chinese personal and place names, time references, bureaucratic offices, and Buddhist terms (also directly from Github).

Some of those efforts:
  • China Biographical Database Project (CBDB), from Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science
  • Buddhist Studies Authority Database Project, databases that integrate information from various projects at the Library and Information Center at Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts. By providing information on Chinese calendar dates, as well as an onomasticon of person, place names and Tripitaka catalogues from Buddhist sources they help with disambiguation and geo-spatial referencing of names and dates.
  • PLATIN, Place and Time Navigator - A HTML5-based tool for the interactive visualization of geospatial and temporal data, developed at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, and available there on Github as a fork and extension of GeoTemCo
Time Machine Project and some related efforts found via Scientists Reveal Ancient Social Networks Using AI—and X-Rays, an article by Sophia Chen for Wired.
posted by filthy light thief (4 comments total) 18 users marked this as a favorite
 
YES. this will make Assassins' Creed that much better.
posted by rebent at 1:13 PM on March 21, 2019 [2 favorites]


:)

It can also have the impact of expanding history from stories of "Great Men," as semi-automated creations of "social networks" will develop with references to individuals who might have otherwise been overlooked in modern summaries of these histories. Like the (digitized, connected online) diary of Samuel Pepys, except, at a much larger scale. "Social network" might sound silly, but it's probably the best descriptor of connecting people between so many different records.
posted by filthy light thief at 1:19 PM on March 21, 2019


This is a very cool idea.
posted by doctornemo at 4:14 PM on March 21, 2019


I appreciate that they're literally putting the tome in tomography.
posted by NMcCoy at 11:26 PM on March 21, 2019


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