History of the Project

Amanda Madden and Colin Rose began conceiving of Modeling and Mapping Violence in Early Modern Italy over a coffee at the Renaissance Society of America conference. Drawing on their expertise in the history of violence and digital spatial analysis, they began by identifying datasets suitable for spatial history methods, assessing necessary resources, and consulting with potential collaborators and users.

During the 2022–23 academic year, Madden and Jason Heppler partnered with a Junior Capstone Team at the Georgia Institute of Technology to develop an early website prototype, including a design mock-up and initial codebase. Junior Capstone teams collaborate with clients to produce proof-of-concept projects for academic credit. The prototype code was deposited in the RRCHNM GitHub repository for open reuse. Rachel Midura and Andrew Vidali joined the project as co-principal investigators in 2023.

Amanda Madden was awarded a CHSS seed grant for the school year 2025-26 to work with Jason Heppler to refine the data model and prototype the database and the mapping interface.

Archival Research and Data Collection

In 2022, Madden, supported by grants from the Delmas Foundation for Venetian Studies and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at George Mason University, conducted archival research in Bologna, Modena, Verona, Vicenza, and Venice, digitizing a broad range of criminal records. Colin Rose undertook complementary research in Florence during the summers of 2022 and 2023.

Archival materials were selected for their richness and compatibility with spatial analysis, with attention to metadata such as dates, gender, age, occupation, relationships between victims and assailants, motives, weapons used, sentencing, and—crucially—locations that could be georeferenced. Additional digitization efforts by Rose, Rachel Midura, and Andrew Vidali have expanded the dataset with sources from Venice, Padua, and Florence.