Agenda

Amanda Madden (George Mason University)
Mapping Urban Violence in Venice and the Terraferma, 1500-1750 using GIS

Registration for online participation: link

Abstract
Outside churches, along narrow alleys, and in corners of Venice, there are 200 or so sloped stones or brick formations. According to contemporary guides, these gobbe antibandito, or anti-bandit stones, were built in places criminals might hide, thus preventing ambushes, assassinations, and assaults. While this may be legend, the Venetian government in the early modern period certainly understood the spatial implications of urban violence and sought to control it not only through policing and punishment but also through elements of infrastructure. Venice’s criminal records, often rich with spatial data, clearly indicate these efforts. In the Archivio di Stato in Venice and Verona criminal sentences of the Council of Ten, as well as the criminal processi in the Avogaria di Comun archive and in Verona, the Giudice di Maleficio often have precise locations for where a crime was committed. Mapping Urban Violence in Venice and the Terraferma 1550-1700 aims to put this information in revelatory new contexts by compiling a database of crimes and mapping them using GIS. This talk will focus on methodology and data but also on the implications of using these digital methods to uncover a particularly rich history of crime and space in the early modern Republic of Venice.

Amanda Madden is Assistant Professor of History and Affiliate Faculty at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM). Her research areas include digital spatial history, digital humanities, early modern Italy, the history of crime and violence, the history of women and gender, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Current digital projects include the collaborative spatial history project, Mapping Violence in Early Modern Italy, 1450-1750, and The La Sfera Project which has been funded by the NEH.
She is a former Marion L Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in digital pedagogy at Georgia Institute of Technology, Research Scientist for the Center for 21st Century Universities, and lecturer for the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. She is currently on faculty leave in the Fall of 2024 as a visiting scholar at the Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, where she is working on the Delmas Foundation-funded project, "Mapping Urban Violence in Venice and the Terraferma, 1500-1700"

The event is part of the seminar series organized by the Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities (VeDPH), Department of Humanities, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.