Giovanni Colavizza

Giovanni Colavizza

Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities

University of Amsterdam

I am an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam, a visiting researcher at The Alan Turing Institute (UK) and at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University (NL).

My work focuses on using data to study cultural and social phenomena, including the human past, art markets, science communication and Wikipedia. I support the open and free access to knowledge, for people and machines alike.

Recent news

Last update: April 2021.



Chiara Braidotti

Research assistant


Dr. Giovanni Colavizza

Assistant professor


Konstantin Todorov

Research software engineer


Dr. Natallia Kokash

Research software engineer


Puyu Yang

Doctoral student



Crypto art

An open-ended investigation into the culture and economics of crypto art: born-digital art tokenized and exchanged on blockchains.

Historical epidemics

A data-driven study of the unfolding and impact of historical epidemic outbreaks, with a focus on early modern Venice.

Impact of OCR quality

What is the impact of content extraction via Handwritten or Optical Character Recognition on downstream text analyses?

Information behaviour of scientists

How scientists gather and communicate information, among peers and with the public? With a focus on COVID-19.

Mapping digital humanities research

An effort to build a map of digital humanities research, and understand its ties within and outside the humanities.

Public understanding of science

How science is communicated and understood publicly, including via online media, social media and Wikipedia?

Transfer learning for historical collections

Where and how to use transfer learning for historical collections?


Academic year 2020 2021

My teaching during the academic year 2020 2021.

Student project ideas (arts, humanities and social sciences)

A list of project ideas for students in the arts, humanities and social sciences.

Student project ideas (science)

A list of project ideas for students in science, including computer science, data science, machine learning, etc.


With my company Odoma, we provide solutions to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) in the cultural heritage sector. We work with both public and private clients and have multiple years of experience. We are particularly good at designing and developing tailor-made solutions. Our clients include the Swiss watchmaker Longines and the Olympic Committee.

I also do independent consulting on matters related to AI for cultural heritage, digital humanities, digitization, scholarly information retreival, AI for science. If interested, get in touch at