TED has an interesting talk about harvesting data to create a kind of google map of the past. Where better to do this than Venice which apparently has 80 kilometers of government archives documenting a 1000 years of city activity - from boats coming and going to every kind of construction. (Venice was after all was a powerful medieval empire, an early adopter of modern banking, and home to so much lovely art.)

The TED speaker Frederic Kaplan is working on a project to digitize the archives and convert the information into maps of Venice's past. He calls this project a Time Machine. With all that determined data collection by Venetian bureaucrats, it's even sadder that present day Venice has been so slow to save itself from sinking. Let's hope this project helps.