Led by an interdisciplinary consortium, the Garzoni project undertakes the study of apprenticeship, work and society in early modern Venice by focusing on a specific archival source, namely the Accordi dei Garzoni from the Venetian State Archives. The project revolves around two main phases with, in the first instance, the design and the development of tools to extract and render information contained in the documents (according to Semantic Web standards) and, as a second step, the examination of such information. This paper outlines the main progress and achievements during the first year of the project.