Andrea NANETTI

Andrea Nanetti has an impressive international education background, having studied in Italy at the University of Bologna, Paris-Sorbonne in France, the University of Cologne in Germany, the National Hellenic Research Foundation in Greece, and Brown University in the United States. His education has been multidisciplinary since high school, incorporating mathematical, physical, computational sciences, entrepreneurship, and humanities such as history, ancient and modern literature, languages, philosophy, philology, palaeography, archival, and library studies. Despite his formal education in historical sciences, he has built a career that combines heritage studies with computational technologies and digital media in various academic and non-academic settings across Europe, the United States, Australia, The Gulf Region, China, India, and Singapore. This diverse experience has contributed to his interprofessional profile, evidenced by his broad range of publications and service locations.

Before and after his tenure, he has kept a very active profile in academic publications, exhibitions, and media productions. His work has appeared in English, Italian, Chinese, Spanish, Korean, and Greek. He has been especially concerned with showing how digital history can empower philological accuracy and historical method with web-based computational processes. He showcases this approach in his study of the history of Venice as contextualised within late medieval Afro-Eurasian trade systems. To achieve this synergistic approach, he has had to master palaeography, and diplomatics, viz. techniques for deciphering archival resources in Latin, Greek, Medieval French, Medieval German, Demotic Greek, Catalan, and Vernacular Venetian. This work also allowed him to produce numerous critical editions, all garnered praise for their methodological rigour. Attention can be drawn to his four-volume critical edition, The Morosini Codex: The World as Seen from Venice (including one volume of historical studies, 2010). Based on this research on primary historical sources, his Atlas of Venetian Messenia (Greek Ministry of Culture and State Archive of Venice, 2011), and the recent books At the Origins of the Venetian Sea State (National Hellenic Research Foundation, 2018) and Venice and the Peloponnese, 992-1718 (Ca’ Foscari University Press, 2021) are perhaps the most original of the works on which his international standing as a scholar of the history of the Venetian maritime state is based. In parallel, the award-winning paper “Interactive Global Histories: For a New Information Environment to Increase the Understanding of Historical Processes” (Culture and Computing, Kyoto, 2013), and the special issue on “Revisiting the World of Fra Mauro's Map and the Morosini Codex from an Artificial Intelligence Perspective”, invited by the editor in chief of the journal The Asian Review of World Histories (Brill, 2016), introduce new approaches to digital history. More recently, the paper, “Defining Heritage Science,” published in Complexity (2021) and the book, “Computational Engineering of Historical Memories,” published by Routledge (2022), present a new original and interdisciplinary path to Computational Human Sciences.

Leveraging these capabilities, his most significant breakthrough in Historical Sciences is an international initiative, Engineering Historical Memory (EHM), exploring how traditional scholarship can efficiently transition into the digital without diluting. EHM functions as an internet-based system to design structures to make historical memory (i.e., the processes by which societies create narratives about historical events) machine-understandable and, ultimately, turn history into a computational discipline through an interdisciplinary blend of philological accuracy, historical scholarship, and computational tools. Historical events are construed as the treasure of human experiences, namely the heritage societies have used to remain resilient and express their cultural identities. EHM empowers the open-access digital exploration of primary historical sources with participatory experiences, interactive visualizations, and dynamic searches for online resources. The broader international academic community has received EHM with enthusiasm, as is evident in the support Dr Nanetti has received from funding agencies (e.g., EU, Singapore Ministry of Education) and industry (e.g., Microsoft, Ruifeng Culture); his fundraising has averaged approximately 200,000 SGD per year (as PI). He has also been encouraged by the interest of leading online repositories of scholarly publications (e.g., Scopus-Elsevier, Taylor&Francis Group) to share their APIs. In April 2021, EHM was the winner of the Italian Commission for the UNESCO nomination to the Memory of the World prize.

The electronic computer radically changed how knowledge societies work, and history isn’t an exception (Nanetti 2022). First, however, we must consider that computationally intensive technology is not specifically crafted for historical sciences. That’s why traditional scholarship experiences many challenges in transitioning bookish knowledge into the digital without diluting content or value. The about 130 scholars and software engineers contributing to the Engineering Historical Memory (EHM) international initiative address this caveat as follows.

1) Analyse critical tools (e.g., information visualisation, image search, sentiment analysis, knowledge aggregation), review best web practices in digital history and develop new algorithms for scholars.

2) Invite scholars and cultural institutions to parse and share established bookish knowledge in machine-understandable databases to test and improve the algorithms developed by EHM.

3) Instruct software engineers in translating those static databases into dynamic web-based applications with real-time updates on publications, images, and videos related to the selected items.

Academic Qualifications

1996 – 2000
Interdisciplinary PhD in “Society, Kingship and Priesthood in Philological, Historical, and Anthropological Methodology (5th-16th centuries)”, University of Bologna, Italy
1993 – 1995
3-year “Seminar on Greek Palaeography and History of the Texts”, Centre for History and Palaeography of the National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation, Athens, Greece
1993 – 1995
Postgraduate courses in Byzantine Studies, Institute of Byzantine Studies of the National Hellenic Research Foundation, Athens, Greece
1991 – 1992
2-year “School of Archival Studies, Palaeography, and Diplomatics”, State Archive of Venice, Italy
1986 – 1990
BA and MA in Historical Sciences, University of Bologna, Italy
 

Professional Qualifications / Memberships

2023 – Present
Member, The Medieval Academy of America
Boston, USA
2023 – Present
Member, Scientific Commitee, Centro Nazionale di Studi Leopardiani
Recanati, Italy
2022 – Present
Member, International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR)
Beijing, PRC
2021 – 2024
Scientific Coordinator overseeing the joint research and exhibition projects of the Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti (since 2022), and Conservatorio di Musica “Benedetto Marcello” for the Celebrations of the Seven Hundred Years Since the Death of Marco Polo (1324-2024)
Venice, Italy
2021 – Present
Member, Steering Committee for Celebrations of the Seven Hundred Years Since the Death of Marco Polo (1324-2024) to be established by a national law in Italy
Venice, Italy
2021 – Present
Member, Register of scientific experts established at the Italian Ministry of the University and Research (MIUR)
Rome, Italy
2021 – 2022
External Referee of the panel of experts who oversee the evaluation of the Italian Universities and Research Institutes within the ERC scientific area SH6 (The Study of the Human Past) for the VQR 2015-2019, Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes (ANVUR)
Rome, Italy
2021 – Present
Vice President/Commodore (Research and Innovation), World Maritime Heritage Society
Singapore
2020 – Present
Member, Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Spatial Information (ACM SIGSPATIAL)
New York, USA
2019 – Present
Member, Advisory Board of the Shanghai Hongqiao International Culture Centre, Shanghai
Shanghai, PRC
2018 – Present
Member, International Scientific Committee, FIRE (Frontières de l’Innovation en Recherche et Éducation) Doctoral School, Learning Planet Institute (former Centre for Research and Interdisciplinarity, CRI)
Paris, France
2017 – Present
Member, Commission on Cartographic Heritage, International Cartographic Association
Bern, Switzerland
2017 – 2019
Member, Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (ACM SIGIR)
New York, USA
2015 – Present
Member, Asian Association of World Historians
Osaka, Japan
2015 – Present
Member, Complex Systems Society
Canberra, Australia
2014 – 2016
Senior Researcher, European Centre of Living Technologies
Venice, Italy
2013 – Present
Founding Co-Director and Member, International Research Centre for Architectural Heritage Conservation, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Shanghai, PRC
2011 – Present
Member, The Medieval Chronicle Society
Liverpool, UK
2007 – Present
Member, Board of Directors, Maniatakeion Foundation
Athens, Greece
2000 – Present
Member, Committee for the Publication of the Sources for the History of Venice
Venice, Italy
 

Summary of Working Experience

2017 – Present
Tenured Associate Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, NTU Singapore
2020
Associate Chair (Graduate Education), School of Art, Design and Media, NTU Singapore (14-01-2020 to 31-07-2020)
2016 – 2020
Associate Chair (Research [and Graduate Education]), School of Art, Design and Media, NTU Singapore (01-07-2016 to 30-06-2017 and 01-07-2017 to 13-01-2020)
2014 – 2016
Associate Professor (Tenure-track), School of Art, Design and Media, NTU Singapore
2013
Visiting Assistant Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, NTU Singapore
2012
Visiting Full Professor, Department of History, University of Venice Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy
2009 – 2012
Faculty Member, DIKEMES - College Year in Athens, Greece
 
2011 – 2012
Scientific Advisor (Latin and Greek Palaeography) for the Italian Ministry of Culture (Emilia-Romagna Regional Directorate)
 
2008 – 2010
Assistant Director (Coordinator of the project team in Ravenna) for the Italian Ministry of Culture, on-line Information System of the Italian State Archives
 
2005 – 2007
Assistant Director (Coordinator of the project team in Ravenna) for the Italian Ministry of Culture, on-line Information System of the Italian State Archives
 
2002 – 2011
Adjunct Lecturer, Faculty of Cultural Heritage Conservation, University of Bologna (Ravenna Campus), Italy
 
2000 – 2004
Research Fellow (Assegno di Ricerca), Department of Cultural Heritage Conservation, University of Bologna (Ravenna Campus), Italy
 
2000
Post-doc Fellow, Department of Cultural Heritage Conservation, University of Bologna, Italy (Declined after being awarded to accept the above Research Fellowship)
 
1997 – 1999
Research Fellow, Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Italy
 
1997
Instructor, British School of Archaeology at Athens, Greece
 
1996 – 2001
Instructor, Centre for History and Palaeography, National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation in Athens, Greece
 
1995 – 1996
Research Fellow, Hellenic Institute of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies in Venice, Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Italy