Isabella Di Lenardo
Fields of expertise
Biography
Isabella di Lenardo is a scientific researcher and lecturer with experience in the fields of Art History and Archaeology, Digital Humanities, and Digital Urban History.She is the coordinator of the EPFL Time Machine Unit at Digital Humanities Institute.
Her training began with archaeology and then moved to Modern Art History, particularly the Venetian context between 1400 and 1800. Her interest primarily lies in the European circulation of artworks and figurative patterns between 1500 and 1650.
She holds a Ph.D in Theories and Art History. Her doctoral dissertation in 2013 provided insightful analysis into the artistic, social, and economic forces driving the trade and circulation of art between key Italian centers and the Flemish cultural area.
Since 2012 she conducted studies on urban history applying digital methodologies, particularly geographic information systems, collaborating on pioneering projects in this field such as Visualizing Venice held by the University Institute of Architecture in Venice, the University of Padua, and Duke University.
In 2014 she joined the Digital Humanities Laboratory at EPFL as a scientific collaborator. She was involved in several projects on urban reconstruction and visual analysis of artworks. She led the Replica project in collaboration with the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice, which involved digitizing the historical photo library and creating a search engine for visual similarity and visual genealogy between images. In this context she coordinated teams of researchers, students, professionals and curators to carry the project.
Between 2018 and 2020, she was a post doc at INHA in Paris holding the role of Principal Investigator National Institute of Art History in Paris initiating and leading the "Richelieu District" urban reconstruction project.
She is Co.PI in the project, SNFS, Parcels of Venice aimed at reconstructing the informational and morphological evolution of urban property in Venice between 1700 and 1808. In this project, thousands of land records were extracted and analyzed to allow for the densification of information related to the owners and functions of the urban before and after the fall of the Ancien Regime in Venice. An exploration and research interface is planned between 2024 and 2025.
Starting in 2016, she was among the initiators of the Time Machine: Big Data of the Past for the Future of Europe project. The aim of the project was that Time Machine design and implement advanced new digitization and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies to mine Europe's vast cultural heritage, providing fair and free access to information that will support future scientific and technological developments in Europe. From the European Time Machine project originated the Time Machine Organization in which Isabella di Lenardo is coordinator of Local Time Machines on a European scale.
Over the years he has coordinated research teams with diverse profiles: researchers, scholars, public institutions, private foundations, and companies. She is very comfortable in international and interdisciplinary working environments, and regularly acts as an intermediary between computer scientists, humanities scholars, engineers, and representatives of cultural institutions.
She has been teaching ex cathedra courses in Urban History since 2010, at EPFL since 2014 in Digital Urban History and also Digital Art History at other universities on an international scale.
Professional course
Project Leader, Post Doc
Institut National d’Histoire de l’art de Paris
2018-2020
Post Doc. Researcher
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Digital Humanities Laboratory
2014-2018
Faculty
VIU Venice International University (Venice)
2013-2018
Post Doc. Researcher
IUAV Istituto Universitario d'Architettura (Venice)
2013-2014
Lecturer
IUAV Istituto Universitario d'Architettura (Venice)
2010-2013
Research
Parcels of Venice
FNS GRANT_NUMBER: 185060During the research activities on 2D and 3D modelling for the Venice Time Machine Project, a specific path was developed on the georeferencing and extraction of features from the Napoleonic cadaster of the city (1808). In 2018 a FNS project called Parcels of Venice, was successfully submitted to deepen the extraction and analysis of cadastral sources, in particular the Napoleonic and Austrian land registers. The grant started in may 2019. The project aims to be one of the first attempts to tackle the density and richness of primary and secondary sources about Venice in the 19th century, trying to go beyond their intrinsically fragmented nature to offer an integrated model of the city and its morphological evolution.
Teaching & PhD
Teaching
Architecture
Humanities and Social Sciences Program
PhD Students
Guhennec Paul Robert, Petitpierre Rémi Guillaume, Vaienti Beatrice,Past EPFL PhD Students
Seguin Benoît Laurent Auguste ,Digital Urban History
The Digital Urban History course is part of a new range of interdisciplinary and collaborative courses open to UNIL and EPFL students.This course aims to develop interdisciplinary skills by combining the fields of expertise of history and digital studies.
It mainly focuses on theoretical and practical learning of digital methods applied to the analysis of past cities.
The course explores the digitization of historical cartography and information modeling of historical data concerning the city.
The use and extraction of cadastral, demographic, and iconographic sources but also various sources that tell the story from other perspectives such as historical press, trade almanacs, and more. The course has a theoretical part in which various case studies are analyzed across Europe.
Students work on data extracted from ongoing urban analysis projects.
Since 2020 they develop projects on Lausanne and the surrounding area. The site is analyzed in its evolution over time under multiple aspects: the morphological evolution of the city, population history, cultural heritage history, aspects related to uninhabited space and ecology, textual sources such as the press or some literary sources. All the projects are published online.
Digital Humanities
The Digital Humanities course provides a comprehensive theoretical foundation in digital humanities while also offering a hands-on approach to digital prosopography.Students will learn to transform biographical narratives, traced across time and space, into digital data. The primary objective is for participants to create wiki-based sources by piecing together biographical profiles of individuals who, though mentioned in historical records like newspapers, lack an online presence. The curriculum covers essential skills such as wiki syntax, person identification, Ngram analysis, and digital cartography. Through this course, students will uncover the 'dark matter' of history—those personalities referenced in historical documents but absent from the digital realm. This exploration emphasizes the importance of digitizing historical data, a key process for expanding and refining our collective understanding of history.