Traghetti in Venice

Introduction and Motivation

Research Question: "Who owns and who operates the Venitian traghetti?"

Objectives:

• Analyze who the owners of the ferries are?
  • Are there prevalent families owning most of the businesses? If so who are they and what are their social and political position in the city
  • Is the ownership stable throughout the years? (Comparing with Sommarioni data?) (Comparing with present data?)
  • Are the owners of Traghetti building centers (squero) the same as owners of traghetti businesses?
  • What other businesses Traghetti owners have and are they in some way related to the Traghetti?

• Analyze who exploits the ferries?
  • Is it a family specific business or open to anyone willing to do such work?
  • Do the families exploiting the traghetti stay the same? (Compare with present data / Sommarioni?)
  • Traghetti workers need a licence to practice, which comes from several guilds (mariegole). Can we find a trace of them in our datasets?

• Spatial analysis
  • Are there specific families owning or exploiting in specific parts of the city? If so, why?
  • Why are traghetti where they are ? (Usually on the main canal, but sometimes not)
  • Which zones are most profitable for traghetti owners (based on rental prices?)

Project Timeline & Milestones

Week	Task	Status
14.10-20.10	- Define research question
Autumn Vacation	--------------------------
28.10-03.11	- Find and read litterature
04.11-10.11	- Read litterature - Extract owner data and provide early visualisations
11.11-17.11	- Midterm presentations - Visualisation tool for historical maps
18.11-24.11	- Catastici and Sommarioni alignment - Entity owned distribution - Traghetti Rental Prices Analysis
25.11-01.12	- Catastici and Sommarioni analysis (ownership change, ...) - Specific families/entities analysis - Spatial analysis of traghetti - Start writing the wiki
02.12-08.12	- Analysis of intersections between squero and traghetti owners - Analyse tenents (number of families?) - Compare results to present day data (if available) - Continue writing wiki
09.12-15.12	- Finish writing the wiki
16.12-22.12	- Spare week

Methodology

1. Data Extraction

The function field in the 1740_Catastici dataset was used to filter out the ferry data. We focused on different kinds of ferries in the Venice area, specifically the Italian words traghetto and gondola.

Keyword in function	Count	Denotes
traghetto	168
gondola	???

2. Family Data Classification

The owner data are extracted

3. Data Feasibility Analysis

a. General Observation of Data

Length, null fields, columns that matter to our research questions and future plans.

b. Feasibility Analysis

(1) For catastici, text_data and geojson are exactly the same, except for the geometry column. The difference in geometry column is likely that they adopted difference coordinate systems, and we prefer to use the geojson one for coordinates.

(2) For sommarioni, text_data and geojson have different lengths and columns. They need to be merged according to parcel_number, because we only need sommarioni combined with catastici, not using sommarioni alone. And we use parcel_number to merge sommarioni into catastici.

(The above conclusions could be found at https://github.com/dhlab-class/fdh-2024-student-projects-ching-chi-andre-renyi/blob/align-two-dataset/validate-text_data-geojson.ipynb)

(3) Cédric told us that id_napo field in catastici is aligned with the parcel_number in sommarioni dataset. However, id_napo and parcel_number have heavy duplications. Ren Yi didn't found a proper solution yet, and we need help from TA for this problem. The duplication analysis could be found at https://github.com/dhlab-class/fdh-2024-student-projects-ching-chi-andre-renyi/blob/align-two-dataset/data-clean-merge.ipynb

Data Extraction

In order to work on traghetti, we need a way to extract each one from the data set. For this purpose we searched the keywords "Traghetto/i" in the "function" column of the dataset using regex. Whilst exploring the data during the Entity Analysis, we discovered that the keyword "Libertà" also refers to the traghetti and included it in our regex. This choice will be motivated in the Discussion section.

Entity Analysis

To understand who owns rents the traghetti, we wanted to delve into several such entities. For this process, we started by extracting all traghetto owners from the data set and made and histogram of traghetto ownership by Entity and Family. This gives us an idea of the most important families and entities in the traghetto business. Based on the results, we chose several specific entities that were interesting, for which we did a more in-depth analysis. For these entities, aside from searching them in historical articles, we plotted a histogram of everything that they owned with the following categories: shops, houses, traghetti and other. This already gives us an idea of the kind of entity we are studying, by discussing the number of properties owned, or the percentage of traghetti owned by these entities. We finally plotted these properties in the Venice map, to try and find any patterns for the placement of the traghetti.

Our work for the tenants followed relatively the same pattern. We found which families rent traghetti the most, then tried to find if there is a correlation between who rents and who they rent it from. Finally, we also plotted the proprieties they rented on the Venice map.

Catastici and Sommarioni merging

How it worked

Spatial Analysis

Methods to do it I guess

Discussion

Data Extraction

While at first we did not think to include the key word libertà in our traghetto research, we found that they also refers to traghetti. Firstly, all traghetto entries in our dataset are in the form of libertà di traghetto, while all libertà entries appear jointly with traghetto or alone. Moreover, when we plot libertà entries on the map, their location appear in the same places, or as we would expect traghettos to appear.

In addition, we found that ownership stayed relatively similar with or without the addition of the libertà keyword. We still find Filosi or Corner at the top of the families list and Milizia da Mar or Ospedale della Pietà at the top of the entities list.

Finally, we found in a Venitian dictionnary written in 1856 that the word libertà is directly related to the traghetto business and means the “licence” to exploit a Traghetto in Venice. Thus, based on this evidence, we can affirm that the keyword libertà is referring to traghetti and we will include them in our analysis. We hypothesize that the difference between libertà and libertà di traghetto in our dataset is based on the understanding of the Venician adminitistration, where it would be understood that libertà would exclusively refer to the traghetti, making the last word redundant.

References

Zanelli, G. (2011). Gondole e traghetti. In: Matematica e cultura 2011. Matematica e cultura. Springer, Milano. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-88-470-1854-9_5

Huffman, K. L. (2024). A View of Venice : Portrait of a Renaissance City. (K. L. Huffman, Ed.; 1st ed.). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478023807

Robin Quillien, « Apprentissages et voies d’accès au métier de barcarolo à Venise à l’époque moderne (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle) », Mélanges de l’École française de Rome - Italie et Méditerranée modernes et contemporaines [En ligne], 131-2 | 2019, mis en ligne le 30 décembre 2019, consulté le 13 novembre 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/mefrim/6651 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/mefrim.6651

Venitian dialect dictionnary: https://www.google.ch/books/edition/Dizionario_del_dialetto_veneziano/OGwoAAAAYAAJ?hl=it&gbpv=1&dq=dizionario+boerio&printsec=frontcover&pli=1