Storia dell’architettura e della città, digital humanities e rappresentazione digitale: il progetto di ricerca sull’insula di San Fantin

This essay, closely connected to the following one, aims to discuss the methodological principles adopted in research on the San Fantin insula. The relationship between architectural and urban history and the discipline of drawing and representation finds today, within digital humanities, a fertile context for collaboration. This involves not only ensuring an adequate narrative framework (realized through diversified outputs: videos, websites, apps...) to disseminate historical research results, but establishing a collaborative laboratory between different interpretive tools where modeling is not merely the final research outcome, but an integral part of it. Through modeling, researchers can achieve two important results in historicalarchival investigation: on one hand, the model can constitute the basis for organizing a network of visual, archival, and bibliographic sources, which moreover constitute a data archive for establishing an adequate strategy for disseminating results. On the other hand, modeling enables visualization of alternative hypotheses for configurations of no longer existing buildings or previous construction phases of existing buildings. Historians can therefore interact with representation experts to select the most probable hypothesis. In this way, adopting these digital technologies enables the renewal of architectural and urban history in relation to a broader public as well