Historical Maps for 3D Digital City's History

Digital technologies can now make an innovative contribution to urban history, lending themselves to processes aimed at achieving quite different goals, from research to training, from the dissemination to the fruition of cultural cartographic heritage. Through technological innovation and the development of multimedia tools, it is now possible to integrate traditional knowledge with alternative means of communication that can foster new methods of research, e-learning, and other potential uses of information and communications technology (ICT) for cultural and educational uses. The research reported herein is part of a more extensive project aimed at studying and visualizing how cities change over time. It focuses, in specific, on the Venice Arsenale (Italy) and develops the combined use of database archiving (DB) with geographic information systems (GIS) to (1) manage and georeference historical data, (2) model key phases of urban development on base maps, and (3) produce renderings and pertinent multimedia materials for the widespread dissemination of historical data to a highly diversified public. These operations were performed with two specific goals in mind: on one hand, to provide new research tools that might open to new knowledge and further enhance the city's history by representing its transformation over time; on the other, to investigate the possibilities of bringing historical research together with today's communication and multimedia distribution strategies.