Blog 6: Project Presentation at the DH2025 Conference in Lisbon

On July 17, Giovanni Pala and Lia Costiner attended the DH2025 conference, the largest in the world in the field of digital humanities, to share the project’s newest developments. This year’s edition was held in Lisbon, Portugal.

Giovanni presented the collaborative paper, “From Draft to Model: Semi-Automated Parametric Extraction of Historical Ship Designs.” This research emerged from a close collaboration with Marco Mercuri and Gian Maria Santi at the University of Bologna. The paper outlined a methodology for digitally reconstructing eighteenth-century ship hulls from surviving 2D plans. This required, first, the reconstruction of historical drafting techniques. The approach begins with naval architecture manuals of the period, such as Duhamel Du Monceau’s Éléments de l’Architecture Navale (1763) and Stallkart’s Naval Architecture (1797), which describe the proportions and geometric steps by which shipwrights produced plans. Drawing on these sources, the team built an algorithm that semi-automatically extracts key points and measurements from British Admiralty ship plans, requiring only minimal user input. The extracted data is then used to build 3D hull reconstructions parametrically, reducing each design to a vector of dimensions and proportions. From these parameters, watertight 3D models are generated, enabling both geometric comparison between designs and, at a later stage, hydrodynamic performance simulations. This marks one of the first efforts to generate 3D reconstructions of historical ship hulls directly from original plans, opening new possibilities for analyzing ship design and performance in the Age of Sail.

The long abstract is due to be published on the DH2025 website: https://dh2025.adho.org/ .