Team
Head: Isabella di Lenardo
Scientist in Digital Humanities, Lecturer in Digital Urban History,
Ph.D in Theories and History of Arts
Scientific Assistant : Irene Bianchi
Doctoral Student : Rémi Petitpierre
Scientific Assistant : Cédric Viaccoz:
System specialist : Nicolas Mermoud-Ghraichy
Administrative assistant: Isabelle Hügli
Our team benefits from student projects, collaborations with doctoral programs, and interactions with other ongoing international projects.
Student in project
- Boubacar Camara, master student in computer science working on the automatic realignment of the photographic archives of the Historical Museum of Lausanne
Former team members
- Lucas Rappo, PhD in history, contributed to the extraction and validation of transcriptions from the Lausanne Census registers.
- Ludovic Pollet, has now joined Unil as a PhD student to study the notarial registers of Lausanne.
- Zaya Khayankhyarvaa, information science engineer, helped develop DHAnnoto, an annotation tool for historical cartography.
- Marion Kramer, MA in Digital Humanities, specialized in Census Data Extraction.
Collaborations
Historical Museum of Lausanne
The iconographic database of the Historical Museum of Lausanne contains nearly 62,500 photographs, paintings and prints. The exploitation of this collection within the framework of the Icono Lausanne project should open new perspectives for the valorization of this heritage.
Archives of the City of Lausanne
The Archives of the City of Lausanne are the guardians of historical administrative documents, including the municipal censuses from 1804 onwards, representing the main historical demographic sources for reconstructing Lausanne population.
Archives Cantonales Vaudoises
The Vaud Cantonal Archives are the custodians of the cadastral series we have geolocated and extracted. We are developing a project on the Cadastre Rénové of 1885-1889, as well as training and awareness-raising initiatives for archive users and the general public.
BnF Data Lab
The BnF Data Lab is a service for researchers who wish to work on the BnF’s digital collections. These collections represent a huge reservoir of data that are sometimes difficult to understand. The Time Machine Unit has developed pedagogical and research activities in partnership with BnF Data Lab to adapt cutting-edge computational approaches to extract and analyze information from BnF heritage collections. BnF’s Data Lab is also an institution where EPFL students can do a research internship.
ARCHiVE Center at the Giorgio Cini Foundation
Time Machine Unit is a partner of the ARCHiVe center at the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice in which it develops projects for the numbering and analysis of documentary heritage. The ARCHiVE center is an eligible institution for EPFL students to do internships.
The Alan Turing Institute | Coloring Cities Research Program
The Coloring Cities Research Program (CCRP) is a research-led initiative develops open-source code to support an international network of low-maintenance, academia-led open data platforms that provide standardized microspatial data on the building stock, at the building level. Time Machine Unit collaborates with CCRP on several research fronts : vectorization of historical cartography and contribution of new information layers for the development of the Colouring Switzerland initiative.