Event City: Venetian Spectacle

Screenshot of neatline site
Kristin L. Huffman, Hannah Jacobs
2021

Type: Lab

Team Venice has generated a digital repository of imagery in Omeka that documents various festivities held in Venice throughout history. Omeka, a platform that permits the inclusion of metadata and descriptive content to accompany visual imagery, has enabled Team Venice to catalogue different events according to each member’s academic interests. Neatline, a plugin for Omeka, has supported the spatial connections of imagery with specific sites in Venice as indicated on an historic map. This geo-rectifiable base map of the city, created by Ludovico Ughi and first published in 1729 in Venice, showcases an original version owned by Duke University’s Rubenstein Library. Using these two digital, online platforms, Omeka and Neatline, team members have generated exhibits that visually capture moments of various events and the sites where they took place. They include the annual November procession from Piazza San Marco to the seventeenth-century church of Santa Maria della Salute; the Feast of the Ascension (La Sensa in Venetian dialect) when the doge pledges his allegiance in marriage to the Adriatic Sea; the Coronation Ceremony of a Dogaressa, wife of the Doge as head of state, and finally, a pilgrim’s visitation to various holy sites on route to the Jerusalem and the Holy Land.

Team Members
  • Ian Acriche
  • Daniel Block
  • Kate MacCary

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