Preserving the Material Culture of Venice
The purpose of this project was to work in conjunction with UNESCO to promote the preservation and restoration of Venetian material culture. Consisting of over 7,000 individual pieces compiled by IQP groups over the past 20 years, this collection constitutes the most complete and comprehensive catalog of Venetian material culture to date. By centralizing the catalog on the Venipedia site through the creation of over 3,000 wiki pages, our group was able to make data readily available to the public. In addition, we worked to expand the database by adding 127 decorative keystones and over 50 traditional Venetian watercraft to the catalog. As a means of further publicizing the catalog, we worked to create a mobile application capable of providing users with information pertaining to individual pieces of public art. Finally, we worked to establish a priority and cost analysis system, to be used in unison with crowdsourcing, in order raise awareness and funds for the restoration of these pieces.
Welcome to the project website for the Venice Project Center's B'11 Material Culture team. Our group cataloged and made accessible a compilation of all pieces of public art as well as the antique boats of the city of Venice, Italy. We also raised awareness about the condition of the pieces, in hopes of securing funding for the project for the restoration and preservation of these works.  We validated the catalogue of public art and traditional boats of the city and added the complete collection to Venipedia with the ultimate goal of making this information accessible to the general public. This information was also made available to users through a mobile app that will allow users to learn more about the specific piece of art they are looking at and allows users to view up-to-date information on the condition of the piece. Through this work, we hope to raise awareness of the problems faced in attempting to restore and preserve the material culture of Venice. In doing so, we attempted to help secure funding for PreserVenice, a non-profit organization we will be working in conjunction with that seeks to preserve Venice's public art, and thus its cultural heritage.
 Feel free to explore our site using the navigation menu on the left. For a more in depth explanation of our project, check out the Project Outcomes tab along with its subsections. Or to track our progress, you may visit and read our blog. | Blog Updates
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For wiki entries related
Material Culture, Public Art, Decorative Sculpture, Functional Sculpture, Traditional Boats