Andrea Nanetti

Andrea Nanetti is a Professor of Digital humanities and the Founding Director of the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Bookish and Experimental Research (LIBER) at Nanyang Technological University Singapore (NTU). As a member of the Digital Humanities Research Cluster at NTU, Nanetti’s main research project Engineering Historical Memory (EHM) demonstrates his Interdisciplinarity and cross-disciplinary practice for managing heritage data, drawing “attention to the necessity of aligning cultural heritage with Artificial intelligence and machine learning”.
== Education and Career ==
Nanetti received his education in Heritage science in Italy, France, Germany, Greece, and the USA. He completed his PhD at the University of Bologna. Before his tenure at NTU, he taught at several colleges, including the University of Bologna, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, College Year of Athens, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He is also the Founding Co-Director (International Relations) of the International Research Centre for Architectural Heritage Conservation at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and a Founding Member of the Board of Directors at the Maniatakeion Foundation. He is currently a 2022-2023 fellow at Dumbarton Oaks (Trustees for Harvard University).
When Nanetti was a visiting research fellow at the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies of Princeton University (2007-2008), he theorised and founded EHM, intending to apply computational methodologies to visualise historical knowledge. Nanetti works with an international team of specialists, from historians to computer scientists, to extract and parse traditional scholarships into machine-readable formats for further analysis and investigation.
For over 30 years, Nanetti has been involved in multi-disciplinary and Transdisciplinarity|trans-disciplinary research. Since 1996, he has led several digital humanities projects and published 20 multilingual books (13 single-authored) and over 80 essays.
== Honours ==
Nanetti has been awarded numerous recognition and honours, including the Research Excellence Award (Outstanding Research on Venetian Maritime Heritage Accomplished Over the Last 20 Years) issued by the University of Florence and International Council on Monuments and Sites|ICOMOS-UNESCO in 2014, the Honorary citizenship of the Municipality of Pylos-Nestor|Pylos-Nestoras (Greece) for his promotion of the regional cultural heritage (2015), the 2021 GLAMi Award for EHM for which Nanetti was the founding editor-in-chief, and the nomination for UNESCO "Jikji Memory of the World" by the Italian National Commission in 2022.
Apart from the above, Nanetti is also a frequent keynote speaker at conferences and public lectures and editor for scholarly journals invited by international cultural and educational institutions.
=== Co-Authored and Co-Edited Books ===
* Venezia and Suzhou - Water Cities along the Silk Roads [Catalogue of the Exhibition] (Venice: Ca’ Foscari University Press, 2022) [Italian, Mandarin, and English] – Co-edited with Angelo Maggi
* Heritage Buildings Conservation. Methods and Techniques. (Padova: Libreria Universitaria, 2017) – Co-edited with Adriana Rossi
* Viabilità e Insediamenti nell'Assetto Territoriale di Imola nel Medioevo: Sperimentazione Esemplare di Mappatura e Visualizzazione del Dato Storico [Roads and Settlements in the Territory of Medieval Imola: A Case Study for Historical Data Mapping and Visualization] (Imola: Editrice La Mandragora, 2014) – Co-authored with Mario Giberti
=== Academic Articles ===
* “Waterways Connecting the Peoples of the World. A presentation of the EHM application for Fra Mauro’s mappa mundi as a virtual laboratory to investigate the Maritime Silk Road discourse in the digital time machine,” Proceedings of the International conference “Venice and the sense of the sea. Perceptions and portrayals” (Italy, Venice, Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 28-29 November 2019), 161-250, edited by M. Aymard and E. Orlando. (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2022)
* “A Sad Story of Poor Living. The Monastic Community of Mount Sinai under Weak Venetian and Manipulative Papal Rules of Law (1211-1276),” Studi Veneziani, 83 (2021)
* “Engineering Historical Memory and the Interactive Exploration of Archival Documents. The Online Application for Pope Gregory X’s Privilege for the Community of Mount Sinai (1274) as a Prototype,” Umanistica Digitale, 10 (2021), 325-357 – Co-authored with Davide Benvenuti
* “Crafting the next generation of web-based learning tools for manuscript artefacts. A focus on science, technology, and engineering codices, world maps, and archival documents in exhibition settings,” SCIRES-IT (SCIentific RESearch and Information Technology), 11(1), 97-114 – Co-authored with Zaqeer Radzi and Davide Benvenuti
* “Defining Heritage Science. A Consilience Pathway to Treasuring the Complexity of Inheritable Human Experience through Historical Method, AI and ML,” Complexity, vol. 2021, special issue on Tales of Two Societies: On the Complexity of the Coevolution between the Physical Space and the Cyber Space.
Category:Professors