[1] The project aims to trace circulation of news, money, commercial goods, migration, artistic and architectural patterns amongst others to create a Big Data of the Past.
It includes collaboration from major Venetian patrimonial institutions: the State Archive in Venice, The Marciana Library, The Instituto Veneto and the Cini Foundation.
[8] The State Archives of Venice contain a massive amount of hand-written documentation in languages evolving from medieval times to the 20th century.
An estimated 80 km of shelves are filled with over a thousand years of administrative documents, from birth registrations, death certificates and tax statements, all the way to maps and urban planning designs.
By combining this mass of information, it is possible to reconstruct large segments of the city's past: complete biographies, political dynamics, or even the appearance of buildings and entire neighborhoods.
Keywords in sentences are linked together into giant graphs, making it possible to cross-reference vast amounts of data, thereby allowing new aspects of information to emerge.
The Digital Humanities Laboratory of EPFL announced on 1 March 2016 the development of REPLICA, a new search engine for the study and enhanced use of the Venetian cultural heritage to be online by the end of 2016.