ABSTRACT
Visualizing Venice was conceptualized as a project that would engage digital technologies to further our understanding of the history of place and space. The Visualizing Venice enterprise is rigorously grounded in primary and secondary source material. As has often been noted, Venice is an extremely well-documented city: its many archives contain a remarkable array of historical documents that represent the city throughout its storied past. As the Visualizing Venice project has progressed, people have created more elaborate 3D models of specific zones of the city and their most important buildings. The technologies of digital visualization can, however, efface the processes of reconstruction and disguise the multiple choices inherent in the creation of a model and the scholarly evidence that informs it. The importance of compelling storytelling cannot be stressed enough, and "visualization" in this public-facing mode must necessarily do the work of both translation and persuasion.
