UChicago art historian Niall Atkinson has won a prestigious grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop a digital research platform entitled “Florence Illuminated: Visualizing the History of Art, Architecture, and Society.” Atkinson and a team of scholars and experts are integrating data from five digital humanities projects into a public, web-based interface, including a geo-referenced map of 1427 Florence. This ambitious experiment in “digital interoperability,” as Atkinson puts it, will be run on the University of Chicago’s Online Cultural and Historical Research Environment, a computational platform known as OCHRE. Building on work Atkinson and his colleagues conducted on the Visualizing the Changing Spatial and Social Ecology of Renaissance Florence research project at the Neubauer Collegium, the new project will enhance access to important historical records and collections, supporting new research and exploration into late-medieval and early-modern Florence.

To learn more, read this news article published by the University of Chicago Division of the Humanities.