International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Chiara Frison, 
The Account of Byzantium and Its Fall in the 
Cronicha
of Giorgio Dolfin
Katerina B. Korrè, 
Stradioti
Mercenaries of Venice and the 
Virtual Library of Venetian Chronicles
: A Case-Study
John R. Melville-Jones
, 
The Battle of Gallipoli 1416: A Case of Irrational Exuberance
Dmitry Vozchikov, 
Laonikos Chalkokondyles and the Late Byzantine Feedback of the Venetian Myth

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Andrea Nanetti
Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore; 
[e-mail]
Engineering Venetian Historiography: 
A Case Study towards an Algebra of Highly-Crossed-Linked Events 
and Transformation Processes1
Beginning in the 9
th
century, Venetian historiographical production has left us a corpus of at 
least 2,000 manuscripts held in public libraries in Europe and North America (not including the 
ones in private collections). Since the 1960s, Italian scholars, inspired and mentored by Agostino 
Pertusi and Antonio Carile, have been systematically investigating these Venetian chronicles 
to produce a coherent corpus of material for the study of the relationships between Byzantium 
and Venice. This historical and philological endeavour has moved existing scholarship from the 
traditional nineteenth-century transcription and translation of single manuscripts of Venetian 
chronicles into the development of an understanding of the complex network of the event-related 
texts that constitute its hidden structure.
Between 2002 and 2004, the project ‘Virtual Library of Venetian chronicles’, funded by the 
Italian Ministry of Culture under the supervision of Antonio Carile, organised these manuscript 
treasures into a new digital platform designed by Andrea Nanetti and developed by Guido Grazioli, 
and made this available internationally. In 2004 the project founded a permanent laboratory, 
directed first by Antonio Carile and now by Giorgio Vespignani, in the Department of Cultural 
Heritage Conservation of the University of Bologna (Ravenna branch), in which a Ph.D. researcher 
was assigned a full time position. The results are continually updated and are available on http://
www.cronachevenezianeravennati.it
The long lasting and deep historical and historiographical relationship between Byzantium 
and Venice is not the topic of this session, which has more than one purpose.
1. First, recognising the scholarly process that has created an understanding of the hidden 
structure of the Venetian chronicles, seen as a coherent corpus of historical evidence produced 
by Venetian society in the reconstruction and consolidation of its historical memory for 
the shaping of its own identity as a society, which would assure a place to its people in the 
international arena.
2. Secondly, sharing an understanding of the best practices of the use of Venetian chronicles by 
Byzantinists and Medievalists.
3. Thirdly, developing and consolidating the use of the texts of the Venetian chronicles after the 
digital development.
1 The research has been funded by NTU Singapore (2014-2016 Start-Up-Grant), the 2014 and 2016 Microsoft 
Research Asia Collaborative Research Programs, 2015 and 2016 Microsoft Azure for Research (PI, Andrea Nanetti).

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In Venetian chronicles as in many other chronicles all over the world, each event (e.g., the 
Fourth Crusade, the conquest of Coron and Modon in 1207) needs a special critical edition, because 
it has been written collecting materials from different sources. Even when it seems to have a simple 
copy of another chronicle, sometimes for a specific event it might not be true.
From a theoretical point of view, the relationship event-facts/evidence-interpretation needs 
to be engineered in order to understand it. And the operation must be done event by event, one by 
one, even for events that appear in the same text. Machine learning can help historians proceed in 
this quite heavy historical task. Today, we can!