2018 will be a pivotal year for the Venice Time Machine project. Not only does it mark the halfway point of the initiative launched in 2012, but it will also include two major steps forward: a drive to expand the project to cities across Europe, and the release of over two million documents that have already been digitized to historians and the general public. "Any records that were kept before 2000 basically don't exist, because we have no means of viewing them," says Frédéric Kaplan, head of EPFL's Digital Humanities Laboratory. This radical statement reflects Kaplan's concern that in the not-too-distant future, only information recorded in electronic form will be accessible - meaning information in all other formats will fall by the wayside. "We urgently need to bring our archives into the digital age. We mustn't lose contact with the past." Bringing the past into the digital age is exactly what the Venice Time Machine (VTM) project sets out to do. It aims to build a multidimensional model of the city that spans the past millennium, using millions of historical documents stored in a variety of formats.
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