Yashiro Letters Database

Itatti Digital Collections entrusted us with the whole process of digitizing, modeling, transforming and visualizing the data held in Itatti Institute.

Industry: Cultural Heritage & Preservation

Time: 1 year

Type: Semantics & Software Development

Project Idea

This project presented the correspondence between Bernard Berenson and Yukio Yashiro, two of the most influential art historians in the West and Japan, respectively.

The Yashiro Letters Database was the result of an international collaboration between three institutions closely connected to Berenson and Yashiro: Villa I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies and Florence (founded by Berenson).

The semantic database ensured the enriched information among the letters, whilst the functionality of annotation provided a new extra feature for data exploration and handling.

Team

Software Engineer
Data Engineer
Operations & Communication Manager

From disorder to discovery, we pave the way.

Activities

Data Transformation & Importing of the Content of Yashiro letters to Berenson

Data Mappings & URI generation

Graphical User Interface implementation

Data Visualization

Annotation of Persons & Places with Letter Content

Goal

The project resulted in a digital exhibition of the Yashiro letters, featuring full support for multilingual content in both English and Japanese. Letter contents were semantically linked to people, places, and external resources such as WikiData entities, enhancing contextual understanding.

Additionally, the platform enabled users to explore the letters through faceted search, allowing for intuitive navigation and discovery based on various metadata dimensions.