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Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) was an innovative graphic artist most known for his architectural studies of Rome and imaginary prisons. “The Digital Piranesi” is a digital humanities project centered in the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University Libraries, at the University of South Carolina. It aims to make rare print materials accessible in a complete digital collection and, in an enhanced, interactive digital edition, to make them visible, legible, and searchable in ways that the original works are not. The scale and breadth of Piranesi’s works require innovative methods of presentation, discovery, and analysis. Digitally representing not only Piranesi’s images but also their interconnections, composite layers, and verbal references promises to reveal new insights about eighteenth-century Rome, the birth of art history as a discipline, and the graphical representation of knowledge.
