Isabella Di Lenardo

Expertise Art History; Digital Art History; Digital Humanities; Urban History; Geographic Information Systems ; Modeling and Urban Reconstruction 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. 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. Education Ph.D | Theories and History of Arts and Honourable mention / Prize of department 2009 – 2013 SSAV Scuola Superiore di Studi avanzati in Venezia (Venice) || IUAV Istituto Universitario di Architettura (Venice) ||University Ca' Foscari, scuola interateneo in Storia delle Arti (Venice) MA | Letters and Philosophy, specialization in Art History and Archeology 2008 – 2008 University Ca' Foscari (Venice) History of Art and Architecture | 2010 – 2011 Nederlands Interuniversitair Kunsthistorisch Instituut (NIKI)(Florence) Professionals experiences Lecturer 2010–2013 IUAV Istituto Universitario d'Architettura (Venice) ResearchCurrent Research Fields Digital urban history, 4D reconstruction and computational cartography: integrated workflows for georeferencing and aligning cadastral/cartographic sources, HTR/OCR and toponym extraction, map segmentation and semantic linking to ingest multilayered historical maps into HGIS/4D models. These pipelines enable systematic monitoring of urban transformation across time, support parcel-level and city-scale analyses, and produce interoperable, provenance-aware datasets for comparative historical inquiry.Computational enrichment of cultural heritage: I develop algorithmic pipelines (HTR/OCR, semantic annotation, 3D photogrammetry, and visual-similarity models) that transform primary archival materials into interoperable, provenance-aware research objects. These digital augmentations increase interpretive density, enabling multilayered querying, large-scale comparative analysis, and linked-open-data interoperability, while supporting ethical stewardship, wider accessibility and participatory curation of heritage resources.Digital art history and computational study of image circulation: quantitative and computational approaches to large image and archival corpora that map networks of actors (patrons, dealers, collectors, ateliers) and trace the geo-temporal diffusion of visual forms. Using image-similarity models, network analysis, prosopographic linkage and spatio-temporal mapping, this axis reconceptualises centre/periphery dynamics and uncovers understudied agents and pathways of transmission while combining close visual reading with scalable, reproducible pattern-detection.Conferences Invited Keynote 2025  Cities, sources, and data: Urban History in the age of AI100 Years of the Institute of Cartography and Geoinformation at ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, Sep 4 -5.  2020 Paintings by AI. Large Scale search for Visual SimilaritiesLa mesure des images : approches computationnelles en histoire et théorie des arts”, DHNord 2020 (on line) https://www.meshs.fr/page/dhnord2020fr, November 2020 2019  Chercher dans les grands corpus d’images à travers l’Intelligence Artificielle : défis et résultats” Intelligence artificielle et institutions patrimoniales : enjeux, défis et opportunités, Journée de l’Association des diplômés et des étudiants de master de l’École nationale des chartes (Ademec), École nationale des Chartes et Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Sep. 2019http://www.chartes.psl.eu/fr/intelligence-artificielle-institutions-patrimoniales, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndT3NLPeQFM Les Musées dans l’ère des répliques authentiques et des Mondes MiroirsFaut-il vider les Bibliotheques et les Musées?, Académie royale des Sciences, des Lettreset des Beaux-Arts de Belgique avec le parrainage du Collège de France, (with Frèdéric Kaplan) Bruxelles, Oct. 2019 https://lacademie.tv/conferences/les-musees-dans-l-ere-des-repliques-authentiques-et-des-mondes-miroirs Repeupler le Quartier Richelieu (1839-1922)Semaine académique du partenariat entre l’Université de WUDA et École nationale des chartes (Enc), Paris, Octobre 2019 Lausanne Time Machine ProjectLaunch of the Center in Digital Humanities EPFL and UNIL, Lausanne, Octobre 2019  The Venice Time Machine Project: Digitising Heritage in Time and SpaceWarburg Institute - London, Jan. 2019, (with Frédéric Kaplan) Venice Time Machine Project, Modelling the PastJournées de la recherche de l'IGN (Institut National de l’Information Geographique et Forestière), Cité Descartes, Marne la Vallée, Apr. 2019 – Paris, Apr. 2019, (with Frédéric Kaplan), http://recherche.ign.fr/jr/jr19/resumes/DiLenardo.pdf 2017  The Venice Time MachineEuropean Union and members of the European Archives Group in Malta (EBNA Meeting), Malta, Apr. 2017, (with Frédéric Kaplan) 2016 European circulation of people, goods and patterns: The Venice Time Machine methodology” CREATE Conference, An e-humanities perspective –University of Amsterdam, Oct. 2016, (with Frédéric Kaplan) 2015 La numérisation massive des oeuvres d’art et ses conséquences sur l’histoire de l’art : REPLICA project”Cloud Collections. Aspects juridiques, scientifiques et techniques de la numérisation de l’art  Neuchâtel, November 2015  Plenary speeches 2025 Theory and Practice of Historical Data VersioningDigiHistCH24, curated by Joelle Prunel, Burkhardt, Baudry, Basel, Switzerland,Feb. 11. 2025 Revealing the Structure of Land Ownership through the AutomaticVectorisation of Swiss Cadastral PlansDigiHistCH24, curated by Joelle Prunel, Burkhardt, Baudry, Basel, Switzerland,Feb. 11. 2025 (with Rémi Petitpierre) Information Indexing for Time MachineBuild your 4D Time Machine Atlas workshop seriesTime Machine Organisation (online). Role: workshop presentation. (Organised by Time Machine Organisation). 2024  The hidden order in the grammar of artistic attributionAnnual Conference of the Digital Humanities Alliance (ADHO)2024, Washington, DC, USA, 6–10 August 2024.  Cartographic Stemmatology: Segmenting Local Deformation Similarities in Historical Maps of Jerusalem18th ICA Conference on Digital Approaches to Cartographic Heritage, Bologna, Italy, Oct. 23 2024 (with Beatrice Vaienti and Frédéric Kaplan) Reinvigorating thematic historical maps – Insights into the Parcels of Venice project18th ICA Conference on Digital Approaches to Cartographic Heritage, Bologna, Italy, Oct. 23 2024 (with Raimund Shnurer) A computational eye for an architectural history of Venetian facadesCIHA World Congress, Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art, — Materiality in History of Architecture and Urban Planning: evolutions of techniques, perceptions and analyses, Lyon, France, 26 June 2024 (with Paul Guhennec) 2023 Machine Reading for Demographic Time Series: 1805–1898 Lausanne Records5th Conference of the European Society of Historical Demography — The Challenge of Comparing Across Space and Time, University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands, Aug. 30 – Oct. 2, 2023 (with Rémi Petitpierre and Lucas Rappo) The Skin of Venice: Automatic Facade Extraction from Point CloudsAnnual Conference of the Digital Humanities Alliance (ADHO) 2023, Graz, Austria, June 2024 (with Paul Guhennec) Ce que les machines ont vu et nous ne savons pas encoreFestival de l’Histoire de l’Art 12eme édition, Ce que l’oeil numérique fait aux images, en honneur de l’apparition du volume, Société et Représentations, Nᵒ 55, Château de Fontainebleau, Jun. 2023 Controversial cities. A 4D versioned model for the convergence of historical information Workshop on Research and Education in Urban History in the Age of DigitalLibraries, (UHDL) 2023, (Controversial Cities session), Munich, 27–29 March 2023 A data structure for scientific models of historical cities: extending the CityJSON format6th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Humanities, Seattle, WA, USA,  (1 Nov 2022) New Approaches to Historical Spatial DataEPFL / Digital Humanities Laboratory seminar series (various internal presentations). Role: invited seminar / internal talk. (EPFL). 2019 Repopulating Paris: massive extraction of 4 Million addresses from city directories between 1839 and 1922Annual Conference of the Digital Humanities Alliance (ADHO), Utrecht, July 2019 (with Albane Descombes) https://dataverse.nl/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.34894/MNF5VQ A Deep Learning Approach to cadastral computingAnnual Conference of the Digital Humanities Alliance (ADHO), Utrecht, July 2019 (with Sophia Ares Oliveira) Repopulating Paris. 4 Million of addresses (1839-1922)Symposium in  collaboration with Getty Research Institute Los Angeles, Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA), Paris, (June 2019)Richelieu. Histoire du quartierInstitut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA) Paris, Oct. 2018 2018 The Digital Cadastre of Venice in 1808European Association of Urban History (EAUH) – Rome, Sep. 2018 (with Bastien Tourenc), https://eauh2018.ccmgs.it/users/index.php?pagename=cms&name=sessiontracks&trackname=new-technologies-and-methods-for-historical-cadastral-studies 2017  Le projet de la Time Machine EuropéenneBibliothèque Nationale de France – Atelier Corpus Data BNF – Paris, Nov.  2017, Invited Speaker, https://bnf.hypotheses.org/2299 The Venice Time Machine ProjectGerman Center for Art History - Paris Mai. 2017, Invited Speaker Web interfaces for 4D Urban ModelInstitut National de l’Information Géographique et Forestière (IGN)– Paris, June 2017,  (with Frédéric Kaplan), Invited Speaker Optimized scripting in Massive Open Online CoursesDariah Teach, Université de Lausanne - Lausanne, Mar. 2017, (with Frédéric Kaplan), Invited Speaker 2016   European circulation of people, goods and patterns: The Venice Time Machine methodologyCREATE, An e-humanities perspective – Amsterdam, Oct. 2016,  (with Frédéric Kaplan)  Mapping the Flow of Paintings in the RenaissanceAnnual Conference of the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) Boston, Mar. 2016  2015 Venice Time Machine: Recreating the density of the past Annual Conference of the Digital Humanities Alliance (ADHO) – Sydney, Jun. 2015, (with Frédéric Kaplan) La numérisation massive des oeuvres d’art et ses conséquences sur l’histoire de l’art : REPLICA projectCloud Collections. Aspects juridiques, scientifiques et techniques de la numérisation de l’art  Neuchâtel, March 2015  2014 Trading knowledge across Europe: database analysis networks (1550-1650)Annual meeting conference of Renaissance Society of America (RSA) – Berlin, March 2014  2013 Built cities, Designed cities, Virtual cities : The museum of the cityConference on Cultural Heritage, “Can the European cities be considered as a Cultural Heritage ? Per una storia della città europea come Cultural Heritage” – Politecnico di Torino, Turin, June 2013   2012   Patron, Collector and Agent: On Carlo Helman and his Network Role in the Production, Circulation and Consumption of Pictures between Antwerp and Venice, ca. 1600Symposium at Kasteel Well (Nederland), for the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek: Artists on the Move: Migrating artists from the Low Countries, 1400-1750, Well-Limbourg (The Netherlands), December 2012 Dalla scala urbana all’allestimento : l’insula delle Gallerie dell’Accademia“Digital Urban History – La storia della città (raccontata) all’epoca della rivoluzione informatica”, Politecnico di Turin, March 2012   2011 L’oratorio dei tedeschi. Artisti oltramontani nella chiesa di San BartolomeoLa chiesa di San Bartolomeo e la comunità tedesca, Studium Generale Marcianum; Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani (Deutsche Studienzentrum in Venedig) – Venice, November 2011 Mercanti, collezionisti, agenti. Il ruolo delle nationi fiamenga e todesca nella nascita e diffusione dei Generi pittoriciInternational conference for Foundation Ermitage Italia (FEI): Alle origini dei Generi Pittorici fra l’Italia e l’Europa attorno al 1600 – Ferrara, September 2011   Cities of Fire”. Iconography, Fortune and the Circulation of Fire PaintingsFlanders and Italy in the XVI Century”. V Convegno AISU, Fuori dall’ordinario: la città di fronte a catastrofi ed eventi eccezionali, Rome, September 2011 Firenze e Venezia, convergenze: il network nederlandese e i rapporti con il collezionismo mediceoLesson for the Istituto Universitario Olandese di Storia dell’Arte di Firenze/ Nederlands Interuniversitair Kunsthistorisch Instituut – Florence, June 2011  2010  The Oltramontani Network in Venice: Hans von Aachen in contextConference to the Institute of Art History, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic: Hans von Aachen and new research in the transfer of artistic ideas into Central Europe – Prague, September 2010  Exploring the Natione fiamenga in Venice. The influence of this newly created Establishment and its impact on pictorial exchanges: The Bassano caseAnnual meeting conference of Renaissance Society of America (RSA) – Venice April 2010 Chair session 2019   Organizer      Richelieu. Histoire du quartier : état des lieuxSeries of lectures as part of the research program “History of the Richelieu District,” National Institute of Art History (INHA)Steffan Hogg, La documentation visuelle de mon livre ». Walter Benjamin et ses recherches iconographiques dans le Cabinet des Estampes pour le Livre des passages, German Center for Art History, Paris, Mai 2019Corinne Le Bitouzé (BnF) : Les collections de mode du département des Estampes et de la photographie de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, Corinne Le Bitouzé, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), site Richelieu, 24 mai 2019Néguine Mathieux (Musée du Louvre) : De l’archéologie aux archives : des sources pour un quartier disparu, le quartier du Louvre, Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA), April 2019 Olivier Poncet (École nationale des chartes) : Wall Street sur Seine ? L’attraction de la finance au quartier Richelieu (XVIIe-XIXe siècle), Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA), April 2019Conference Organizer      Time Machine Conference”, EPFL, Lausanne Oct. 2018  Session organizer / chair       New Technologies and Methods for Historical Cadastral Studies (1500-1950)European Association of Urban History (EAUH ) – Rome, September 2018 (with Frédéric Kaplan)https://eauh2018.ccmgs.it/users/index.php?pagename=cms&name=sessiontracks&trackname=new-technologies-and-methods-for-historical-cadastral-studies 2016  Session organizer / chair      Images on the Move: The Weaving of Circulations and Transfers during the Renaissance through Digital AnalysisAnnual Conference of the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) – Boston, March 2016  2015   Session organizer / chair      Le porte dopo le porte. Varchi, barriere, caselli daziari: le chiavi dell'accesso e dell'approvvigionamento urbanoEuropean Association of Urban History (EAUH ) – Padova, September 2015 (with Vittorio Zucconi) 2013  Session organizer / chair      The ephemeral city : invention, rhetoric and counterfeiting (XV-XVIII centuries)Associazione italiana storia urbana (AISU), Visibile invisibile, percepire la città tra descrizioni e omissioni – Catania, September 2013   2011    Conference Organizer La chiesa di San Bartolomeo e la comunità tedesca, Studium Generale Marcianum; Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani (Deutsche Studienzentrum in Venedig) – Venice, November 2011 (With Gianmario Guidarelli and Natalino Bonazza)Parcels of Venice FNS GRANT_NUMBER: 185060The Parcels of Venice project created one of the most comprehensive geohistorical computational model of city of Venice by extracting and aligning cadastral data, with a diachronic model of the city and its population. Built on a robust “informational skeleton” of 19th cadastral sources, the project integrated additional datasets from the 16th to the 18th centuries, as well as a medieval Venice dataset. Two public platforms were developed: The Time  Atlas (https://timeatlas.eu/), for the general public to connect places with archival documents, and a Visual Analytics Dashboard for researchers to explore thematic maps, analyze property distribution, ownership patterns, and institutional change, and test historical hypotheses. The project also introduced key processing pipelines for cadastral maps and registers, enabling both Venice-specific and cross-national applications. The resulting datasets, covering cadastral surveys from 1582 to 1808, land registers, ownership records, commercial directories, and historical toponyms, are available on parcelsofvenice.epfl.ch and timeatlas.eu, with open access on Zenodo planned for 2025. Through workshops and community-building initiatives, the project has laid the foundation for a growing network of scholars, heritage institutions, and digital humanists using its methods and data to explore historical urban morphology at unprecedented scale and detail. Teaching & PhD Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Benoît Laurent Auguste Seguin, Paul Guhennec, Beatrice Vaienti, Rémi Guillaume Petitpierre Courses AI for urban history URB-409 This course explores how AI and LLMs can be used to analyze historical urban data. Students study city evolution (1700-now) through hands-on projects, producing a web interface and a visual booklet based on sources like maps, directories, and cadastral records. Digital urban history: Lausanne Time Machine I HUM-450 This course is part of a series of interdisciplinary and collaborative courses open to students from UNIL and EPFL.It focuses on urban history through the application of computational methods and the development of a digital project in group. Digital urban history: Lausanne Time Machine II HUM-454 This course is part of a series of interdisciplinary and collaborative courses open to students from UNIL and EPFL.It focuses on urban history through the application of computer methods and the development of a digital project. AI for Urban History  AI for Urban History, URB 409, course explores how AI and LLMs can be used to analyze historical urban data. Students study city evolution (1700-now) through hands-on projects, producing a web interface and a visual booklet based on sources like maps, directories, and cadastral records.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.