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Review: Engineering Historical Memory

A review of Engineering Historical Memory, a project providing open access to primary historical sources including maps, travel accounts, chronicles, codices, and paintings in multiple languages, directed by Andrea Nanetti

Published onJan 27, 2025
Review: Engineering Historical Memory
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Project
Engineering Historical Memory

Project Director
Andrea Nanetti, Nanyang Technological University

For information about the whole team, please visit the site.

Project URL
https://engineeringhistoricalmemory.com/

Project Reviewer
Laura K. Morreale, Independent Scholar


Project Overview

Andrea Nanetti and Cui Yifang

Engineering Historical Memory (EHM) is an ongoing research project for the aggregation and visualization of historical information in the machine learning age, featuring a diverse range of heritage objects including maps, travel accounts, chronicles, codices, sites, and paintings. It provides free and open access to credible primary historical sources for scholars, decision-makers, and the public. EHM offers the systematic exploration of the applicability of digital technologies (e.g., data visualisation, federated searches, sentiment analysis, blockchain) to the advancement of learning in historical sciences; testing of the results on selected maps, chronicles,and  travel accounts in Venetian, Latin, Chinese, Arabic, Thai, Malay, and Russian, among other languages; and multimodal and multilingual discovery of new knowledge from primary historical sources.

Research derived from EHM takes a cross-disciplinary approach and applies computationally intensive techniques such as pattern recognition, data mining, machine learning algorithms, as well as interactive and visualization solutions. On EHM, primary scholarships are parsed into a machine-understandable format. Such a format supports the digital visualization of historical objects as well as contrast and comparison of different sources. Moreover, EHM offers 3D models and animations to accompany the ancient texts and images, making them more accessible and less obscure. One of the critical features of EHM is to allow users to connect selected historical elements to relevant secondary multimedia references in real-time. This includes scholarly literature, images, and videos retrieved via API from various reputable online databases supported by the EHM infrastructure.

EHM was first theorized by Nanetti when he was a visiting scholar at Princeton University in 2007. In subsequent years, he published the first series of research results of EHM testing on highly cross-linked historical data. In 2013, Nanetti founded the Singapore EHM research team following his professorship at Nanyang Technological University Singapore (NTU). Then, two years later, EHM went live on Microsoft Azure as an interactive database for history and cultural heritage after receiving several Microsoft research grants.

As part of the NTU Digital Humanities Research Cluster, EHM has thus far engaged more than 100 researchers, historians, and software engineers globally and trained numerous undergraduate and postgraduate students. Collaborating with international institutions, research centres, and publishers, the team has developed and launched over 20 applications on EHM. These applications have been adopted by top institutions including, for example, the incorporation of EHM’s application Fra Mauro’s Map of the World in the virtual exhibition Venezia and Suzhou: Water Cities along the Silk Roads (September-December 2022) co-organised by Ca' Foscari University of Venice and Soochow University in Suzhou.

The latest experimental projects of EHM explore the development of an image search engine led by the research teams at Delft University of Technology and NTU, as well as the application of data-driven agent-based modelling and simulations to selected historical and socio-environmental datasets for the study of sea-lane resilience.

Since its establishment, EHM has been funded by many organizations and is recognized internationally. Sponsors of the EHM research include government agencies, private corporations, cultural and educational institutions. In addition, EHM was nominated in 2022 by the Italian National Commission for UNESCO to compete for the biennial Jikji Prize. In 2021, EHM was a GLAMi Award winner and a Falling Walls Science Breakthrough finalist.


Project Review

Laura K. Morreale

Engineering Historical Memory (EHM) is neither a computer-enabled tool, nor a digital project, nor an online authority. Rather, it is the proof-of-concept for a theory of historical knowing dependent upon digital communicative modes, one conceived more than a decade ago by project director Andrea Nanetti and put into practice in the intervening years. As the “About” page explains, “EHM is an ongoing research project … to design and test interactive applications for virtual (re)organisation and delivery of historical knowledge in the digital age.”  

To this end, the project expressly links both “mapping and visualization” and “search and visualization” for users to explore how they might see and receive historical data in ways that diverge from how they previously have. The project interface, when queried, calls up a set of responses to users’ prompts based on project “case studies” on several sets of stored and structured datasets compiled from selected historical sources and presented alongside externally hosted reference materials like Wikipedia. Once a query is submitted, a response screen divided into four sections appears, providing information extracted from a set of interconnected resources and displayed as a timeline, a map of significant toponyms, an encyclopedia entry, and a project-generated narrative. The juxtaposition of these multiple forms of information — all of which are understood as historical and have traditionally provided the building blocks of what is considered knowledge about the past — challenges users to think critically about how the various data displays condition what we ultimately do learn. 

 The case studies draw upon the subject-area expertise of the project director and members of the EHM research team. Particular attention is given therefore to information extracted from late medieval and early modern Italian sources, including maps, travel narratives, and illustrated manuscripts, but also from sources coming from Hungary, Russia, South Asia, Tanzania, and further afield. The types of sources are also quite varied, EHM also analyzes paintings, archival documents, and archaeological sites. The sources also cross traditional periodization boundaries, featuring materials from antiquity to the 19th century.

The project-generated content is of high scholarly quality, even if some case studies are more developed than others. The award-winning Fra Mauro Map of the World (c. 1460), for example, is heavily enriched with geodata and includes an introduction, infographics, and a set of curated videos to accompany the cartographic presentation. A similar map from mid-15th century Genoa contains less scholarly scaffolding, which may simply indicate its status as a project that is still underway. At times, the site’s classification logic — whether done according to generic or thematic boundaries for example — remains fuzzy. And although some of the case studies provide a helpful introduction to how users might interact with EHM (see Martini’s Treatise on Civil and Military Architecture, for instance), the project could do more to orient users to the various components included on the site and how they might be used during historical inquiry.

These quibbles aside, the project is an intriguing and important exploration of what our digital capabilities can do for historical thinking. More importantly, the project displaces narrative as the predominant means of communicating our understandings of past events, and does so in a capacious, trans-regional, non-traditionally-periodized way. 

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