Chiara Piccoli is Research Fellow and Data Scientist at the 4D Research Lab (Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam). Her research interests focus on urban and domestic contexts and on the application of 3D modelling and GIS mapping for the visualization, analysis and communication of historical data.
In 2018-2022, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam in the NWO-funded project 'Virtual Interiors as Interfaces for Big Historical Data'. During this project, she researched seventeenth-century Amsterdam houses and created 3D reconstructions of their interiors to investigate how domestic spaces were used and experienced. She is currently preparing a monograph on the private library of the Amsterdam patrician and VOC director Pieter de Graeff (Brill, accepted for publication).
Between 2010 and 2015, she was appointed researcher in the FP7 European project CEEDS - The Collective Experience of Empathic Data Systems. The project's overarching goal was to develop innovative tools that would exploit implicit human responses to guide users in discovering patterns and meaning within large datasets.
In her PhD thesis (Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, 2018) Chiara explored the contribution of 3D procedural modelling and GIS for the analysis and visualization of past cityscapes.
She holds a MA degree in Greek and Roman Archaeology (University of Siena, 2008) and a MA degree in Book and Digital Media Studies (Leiden University, 2010) for which she was awarded the Tiele-Stichting thesis prize in 2011 for the best thesis in the field of Book Studies in the Netherlands.
Project portfolio at https://visualpasts.eu/