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Poetry at the first steps of Artificial Intelligence
This paper is about Artificial Intelligence (AI) attempts at writing poetry, usually referred to with the term “poetry generation”. Poetry generation started out from Digital Humanities, which developed out of humanities computing; nowadays, however, it is part of Computational Creativity, a field that tackles several areas of art and science. In the paper it is examined, first, why poetry was chosen among other literary genres as a field for experimentation. Mention is made to the characteristics of poetry (namely arbitrariness and absurdity) that make it fertile ground for such endeavors and also to various text- and reader-centered literary approaches that favored experimentation even by human poets. Then, a rough historic look at poetry generation is attempted, followed by a review of the methods employed, either for fun or as academic projects, along Lamb et al.’s (2017) taxonomy which distinguishes between mere poetry generation and result enhancement. Another taxonomy by Gonçalo Oliveira (2017), dividing between form and content issues in poetry generation, is also briefly presented. The results of poetry generators are evaluated as generally poor and the reasons for this failure are examined: inability of computers to understand any word as a sign with a signified, lack of general intelligence, process- (rather than output-) driven attempts, etc. Then, computer-like results from a number of human poetic movements are also presented as a juxtaposition: DADA, stream of consciousness, OuLiPo, LangPo, Flarf, blackout/erasure poetry. The equivalence between (i) human poets that are concerned more with experimentation more than with good results and (ii) computer scientists who are process-driven leads to a discussion of the characteristics of humanness, of the possibility of granting future AI personhood and of the need to see our world in terms of a new, more refined ontology.
Copyright (c) 2022 Christina Linardaki http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Two Projects from the metaLAB (at) Harvard
The presentation of these two projects the metaLAB (at) Harvard complements Jeffrey Schnapp's interview published in the section Perspectives of this issue of Humanist Studies and the Digital Age. The first project, A Flitting Atlas of the Human Gaze, performs an art historical experiment. The second project, Their Names, is an online Denkmal or monument that visualizes the names of 28,000+ fatal encounters with American police dating from the year 2000 up until the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020.
Copyright (c) 2022 Jeffrey Schnapp http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Just Because We Can Doesn’t Mean We Should: On Knowing and Protecting Data Produced by the Jewish Consumptives’ Relief Society
A recent project at the University of Denver Libraries used handwritten text recognition (HTR) software to create transcriptions of records from the Jewish Consumptives’ Relief Society (JCRS), a tuberculosis sanatorium located in Denver, Colorado from 1904 to 1954. Among a great many other potential uses, these type- and hand-written records give insight into the human experience of disease and epidemic, its treatment, its effect on cultures, and of Jewish immigration to and early life in the American West. Our intent is to provide these transcripts as data so the text may be computationally analyzed, pursuant to a larger effort in developing capacity in services and infrastructure to support digital humanities as a library, and to contribute to the emerging HTR ecosystem in archival work. Just because we can, however, doesn’t always mean we should: the realities of publishing large datasets online that contain medical and personal histories of potentially vulnerable people and communities introduce serious ethical considerations. This paper both underscores the value of HTR and frames ethical considerations related to protecting data derived from it. It suggests a terms-of-use intervention perhaps valuable to similar projects, one that balances meeting the research needs of digital scholars with the care and respect of persons, their communities and inheritors, who lives produced the very data now valuable to those researchers.
Copyright (c) 2022 Jack Maness, Kim Pham http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
After the Book, the Book? The Digital Writing Experiments of François Bon
While most commentators believe that the print book will survive the advent of the ebook, it is at the same time hard not to think that the fundamental technological changes ushered in by the digital revolution will fail to have profound effects on the forms of the book. Arguing that literary forms have always depended on the “material conditions of their enunciation,” the French author François Bon uses historical examples to suggest the book will undergo major, if yet unforeseen, transformations. He maintains that it is urgent for writers to experiment with the possibilities brought about by the digital revolution, lest the actual developments be decided by the commercial interests of large technology entities. In his own experiments with the form of the book in the digital environment -- in his “novel” Tumulte, which consists of daily blog posts that mix fiction, memoir, criticism, and other genres, and in a series of digital remediations of his early novel, Limite -- Bon imaginatively explores the limits of the concept of the book. Yet while these experiments are suggestive, it is less clear that they represent viable avenues for the book’s development, since their main appeal is arguably for scholars and theoreticians. Focusing on the means of organization and delivery, and the ontological ambiguities arising from the multiple versions of the same text, Bon’s experiments skirt the core power of the book: the sustained arrangement of words that has been the principle means whereby books have conveyed content and sustained intellectual culture.
Copyright (c) 2022 Jeff Staiger http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Unknown Future, Repeated Present: A Narrative-Centered Analysis of Long-Term AI Discourse
Recent narratives and debates surrounding long-term AI concerns—the prospect of artificial general intelligence in particular—are fraught with hidden assumptions, priorities, and values. This paper employs a humanistic, narrative-centered approach to analyze the works of two vocal, and opposing, thinkers in the field—Luciano Floridi and Nick Bostrom—to ask how the representational, descriptive differences in their works reveal the high stakes of narrative choices for how we form ideas about humanity, urgency, risk, harm, and possibility in relation to AI. This paper closely reads Floridi and Bostrom using different representational models and historical narratives from works in the environmental humanities, literary theory, bioethics, and the history of technology to uncover the imaginative terrain of recent long-term AI discourse and reveal the complexity and limitations of the messaging underlying the works of different authors.
Copyright (c) 2022 Micaela Simeone http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Time of the End? More-Than-Human Humanism and Artificial Intelligence
The first part (“Is there a future?”), discusses the idea of the future in the context of Carl Schmitt’s vision for the spatial revolutions of modernity, and then the idea of Anthropocene, as a synonym for an environmental crisis endangering the very survival of humankind. From this point of view, the conquest of space and the colonization of Mars at the center of futuristic and technocratic visions appear to be an attempt to escape from human responsibilities on Earth. The second part (“AI and other hyperobjects”) discusses the extent of intellectual hubris expressed in computation, AI (Garvin Minsky e Ray Kurzweil), and the philosophy of computing and information (Eric Fredkin), involved in the elaboration of new theoretical assessments on the ultimate nature of reality. Their vision is then contrasted and made to interact with that of philosopher Timothy Morton. He has taken the perspective of global warming and the possibility of ecological catastrophe seriously, avoiding all the futuristic enthusiasms and instead emphasizing the radical nature of the transformations that humans experience in the present. In this perspective, AI becomes one of the “hyperobjects,” like the Internet or climate change, in which humans are immersed. Morton’s hyperobjects delineate an uncanny view of the future; this uncanniness is not related to the supernatural but to the environment. The third section (“More-than-human-humanism”) further reflects on the “uncanniness” that human perceive in the encounters with the manifestations of hyperobjects. It also seeks to understand the human position in the face of the radical technological transformations induced by cybernetics and AI. This section discusses Anti-humanism, Transhumanism, and Posthumanism within the broader category of more-than-human thought, which seems to be a more appropriate term to clarify the possible misunderstandings induced by the word “posthuman” and “transhuman.” The central question is not to empower (Transhumanism) or disempower (Posthumanism) humans, but to see them in relation to what is not human, including other animals, the environment, and the machine. The analysis considers the works of Cary Wolfe, Jane Bennet, Bryant Levi, among others, and introduces ethical debates on cyborgs, robots, and Autonomous weapons systems (AWS). The fourth section (“Ethical Perspectives”) continues this inquiry, concentrating on the non-standard ethical theories of Luciano Floridi (Computer and Information Ethics) and David Gunkel (The question of the Machine). It examines the opportunity and feasibility of including in the discussion on the ethics of our time - characterized by the pervasiveness of AI - the notions of consciousness as theorized by Emmanuel Levinas’s Humanism of the Other and Paul Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another. Finally, the last section (“The time of the end?”) reflects on how the hyperobject, Anthropocene, re-establishes a sense of limits in human history and confirms the special responsibility of human beings, and supports the need for a more-than-human-humanism. The latter, in other words, means intertwining ourselves with a unique ecosystem which cannot be overlooked and which restores meaning to our relationship with the past, present, and future. The awareness of the current challenges of technology can and must express itself in different forms of resistance to the adverse effects of AI in our lives. The ethical approach based on the persisting role of human consciousness is essential, but it must be coupled with human decision-making and political action.
Copyright (c) 2022 Massimo Lollini http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Education, Technology, and Humans: An Interview with Jeffrey Schnapp
The interview reconstructs Jeffrey Schnapp's brilliant career from his origins as a scholar of Dante and the Middle Ages to his current multiple interdisciplinary interests. Among other things, Schnapp deals with knowledge design, media history and theory, history of the book, the future of archives, museums, and libraries. The main themes of the interview concern the relationships between technology and pedagogy, the future of reading, and artificial intelligence.
Copyright (c) 2022 Massimo Lollini, Jeffrey Schnapp, Arthur Farley http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
When I proposed having the future at the center of this issue, which marks the 10th anniversary of Humanist Studies & The Digital Age, I was aware of the complexity of this controversial topic. The possibility of magnifiche sorti e progressive — a “splendid and progressive destiny” — made possible by human technology inspires hope in some and critique in others. The expression comes from one of Leopardi’s last poems, Ginestra o il fiore del deserto (Broom, or the flower of the desert), where he uses it ironically to suggest the powerlessnesss of humanity in the face of natural disasters. The poet argues with all those who praise the human condition and progress acritically. He condemns their hubris and bitterly invites them to visit the arid slopes of Vesuvius, reduced to a desert by the volcano’s eruption.
#LauraSpeaks: Remediations of Pellegra Bongiovanni’s “Risposte”
This paper examines the implications of digital remediation which translates and transforms an older text, endowing it with new life, in relation to the project #LauraSpeaks, a translation and remediation of Pellegra Bongiovanni’s Risposte di Madonna Laura alle rime di Messer Francesco Petrarca, in nome della medesima. Divided into three different sections, it describes the steps involved in this project, from the discovery of the original text and the analysis of Bongiovanni’s contribution within the realm of Petrarchism, moving to a discussion of the translation of her work from Italian to English and the creation of the “Twitterature” version of the text, then finally to an analysis of the text’s transformation into the film medium. This paper also investigates the theoretical premises of digital remediation and the role that hypertext plays in multiplying opportunities for meaning-making and in enriching the act of reading and writing.
Copyright (c) 2019 gerardo pisacane http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
The Dialogues Bioregional Project: Landscape Ecology in Central Italy from the Sixth Century to the Present
Pope Gregory I (r. 590-604), commonly known as Saint Gregory the Great, is celebrated for re-organizing both the institutional and liturgical life of the Roman Catholic Church; for instigating the first recorded large-scale mission from Rome to England; and for his writings. Among these, a distinct importance has been attributed to his “Dialogues,” a collection of four books of miracles, signs, wonders, and healings carried out by then little-known holy men, which represent a portion of central Italy as a sacred space where the Christian God is present in both human and non-human form, while also interacting with the environment by performing landscaping functions. This article outlines the “Dialogues Bioregional Project,” a digital, interdisciplinary interface on Italian landscape ecology which would promote dialogues between scientists and humanists as well as provide a modeling tool for environmental and cultural awareness. Shaped around the “Dialogues” of Pope Gregory I, this digital humanities project explores continuities and discontinuities between the socio-political and ecological history of a specific section of Italian territory, a set of multidisciplinary environmental narratives (from c. 600 AD to the present), and local communities. My aim is to introduce readers to the ecological potentials of Gregory’s book and thus prompt scholars interested in the environmental humanities and the integration of biophysical and analytical approaches with humanistic and holistic perspectives to become part of the “Dialogues Bioregional Project” and collaborate in its further development.
Copyright (c) 2019 Damiano Benvegnù http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Noisemakers! Putting the Analog in Digital Humanities
Noisefest! is an interactive, multisensory experience centered around a small Maine town and rooted in the sounds and noise of its streets. Comprising a Virtual Reality tour, soundwalks and remixes, a 2D laser cut geographical map with Arduino controllers, and a Futuristic noise intoner, one of the objectives of this collaborative, transdisciplinary, and theory-based project is to create concrete opportunities for students to participate in the “real” world and engage with the materiality of noise and its manifestations by interacting with the soundscape through novel, interactive, and multisensory practices. Noisefest! is also an example of how one can creatively and artistically extend the reach of the digital humanities beyond the borders of academia and into the public realm.
Copyright (c) 2019 Serena Ferrando, Mark Wardecker http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
The Origins of Humanities Computing and the Digital Humanities Turn
At its beginnings Humanities Computing was characterized by a primary interest in methodological issues and their epistemological background. Subsequently, Humanities Computing practice has been prevailingly driven by technological developments and the main concern has shifted from content processing to the representation in digital form of documentary sources. The Digital Humanities turn has brought more to the fore artistic and literary practice in direct digital form, as opposed to a supposedly commonplace application of computational methods to scholarly research. As an example of a way back to the original motivations of applied computation in the humanities, a formal model of the interpretive process is here proposed, whose implementation may be contrived through the application of data processing procedures typical of the so called artificial adaptive systems.
Copyright (c) 2019 Dino Buzzetti http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Collective Intelligence, the Future of Internet and the IEML
Collective Intelligence, the book in French, that Pierre Levy wrote before the existence of the worldwide web, when only the Internet existed, it's a philosophical vision of the future, a philosophical vision of what could be a global civilization based on the digital and the general interconnection of all the computers. In the interview, Levy addresses the creation o the WWW by Tim Berners Lee as a form of collective intelligence. He then discusses Berners Lee's proposal for a reform of the WWW to avoid its confiscation by the big platforms, such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Then, he introduces his most recent project the IELM as a tool for semantic metadata and a code between the natural languages and the algorithms, and all the apparatus of computations.
Copyright (c) 2019 Massimo Lollini, Arthur Farley, Pierre Levy http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Semantic Metadata, Humanist Computing and Digital Humanities, opens with an important interview with Pierre Lévy that reconstructs the key moments of his philosophical vision of the internet, and the World Wide Web, up to his most recent and highly innovative proposal of the Information Economy MetaLanguage (IEML). In the “Interventions” section our journal features an important reflection by Dino Buzzetti on the distinction between Humanities Computing and Digital Humanities. The essay, originally published in Italian, critically supports the rationales behind Humanities Computing, characterized by a primary interest in methodological issues and their epistemological background. Buzzetti reconstructs accurately the history of this idea starting from the seminal works of scholars like Jean- Claude Gardin, who underlined the need for an awareness that computation applied to the humanities requires both representation (data structures), and information processing (algorithms). The three projects that are introduced in the third part of the journal respond differently to the theoretical solicitations presented in the first two sections. Following the categories of Pierre Lévy, we should say that, even if in a different way, all three projects are the product of a collective intelligence and at the same time contribute to expand the knowledge of a physical territory (in the case of Noisemakers! and of The Dialogues Bioregional Project) or of a literary tradition (in the case of #LauraSpeaks), making the process of their digital processing transparent.
Copyright (c) 2019 Massimo Lollini http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Audioscan Milano. Exploring Avant-Garde Sound Practices via Digital Humanities
Audioscan Milano explores the strategies and experiments in the field of sound and noise of Milan’s legendary Studio di Fonologia Musicale. A multimedia installation composed of hundreds of field recordings of the city of Milan, Audioscan Milano provides its audience with a multisensory experience of the urban soundscape and the opportunity to interact with it digitally. The manipulation of noise and its transformation into musical sound via sophisticated electronic equipment emulates the Studio’s audio techniques but also exposes the reasons behind its failure to attract a wider audience. Visitors to Audioscan Milano expect to hear urban noise rather than musical sounds and, despite some enthusiasm around being able to mix sound objects on the map and move them around the room, they fail to appreciate the technical subtleties of the procedures behind the music. Ultimately, Audioscan Milano constitutes an important link to Italy’s musical heritage of the 1950s and 1960s and can learn from its limitations, particularly when it comes to engaging the audience to play a more active role in the auditory experience of the city.
Copyright (c) 2017 Humanist Studies & the Digital Age https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Galileo's Ariosto: The Value of a Mixed Methods Approach to Literary Analysis
Using Galileo Galilei's Saggiatore (1623) and Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso (1532) as a focal point, this article evaluates a mixed methods approach for identifying matches of words and phrases that are rich material for close reading and contextualization. The method focuses on ngram matches and networks of phrases that are used together. The similarity of Galileo's treatise to Ariosto's poem is compared to 45 other early modern Italian texts to evaluate the relative exceptionalism or normality of the findings. Ngram matches reveal a series of previously unknown connections between the Saggiatore and Furioso, which indicate an analytical understanding of the poem, rather than borrowing of narrative or figurative expression. Network analysis offers a preliminary outline for two communities of texts that frequently use the same ngrams found in the Furioso.
Mapping Dante: A Digital Platform for the Study of Places in the Commedia
This essay presents Mapping Dante, a project for the study of the geography of the Divine Comedy through a digital map visualizing all the place-names mentioned in the text. First, the project background is sketched out by a concise overview of the history of the reception and visualization of Dante’s geography, of the constellation of digital Dante projects, and of GIS literary mapping. Second, specific stages and issues of Mapping Dante are discussed: the making of the dataset and its categories, the heterogeneity of medieval geography, the structure of the map with layers and pop-up cards. Conceived as a repository of Dante’s encyclopedic use of geography in the Commedia, the map is also an experiment in connecting text and cartography through the possibilities offered by GIS technology. By exploring different visualizations of a set layers based on textual, cultural and rhetorical categories, users can search for patterns in the distribution of Dante’s geographical references, and can retrieve information relevant to each passage in which a place is mentioned.
Visualizing the Fragmenta's poetic systems
Digital tools offer new dimensions and additional contexts both in teaching and in researching Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, providing users with visual insights into his carefully planned work. This essay investigates interactive and visual representations of material and spatial systems of the Fragmenta and the deep interaction between the digital code created to build the Petrarchive’s visual indexes and the original Medieval forms.
Toward a Distributed Gallery in the scholarly network
How can we persuade universities to own their responsibilities to the practice-based research that they patronize — while bringing new, fully-accredited methodologies and infrastructures to Humanities and Arts scholarship? Link to Keynote video: https://youtu.be/BNlmGD8yJhc​
Digital Humanities and Italian Studies: Research Outcomes
This short paper serves as an introduction to the Projects section of this issue of Humanist Studies & the Digital Age, since the contributions are connected by the authors' participation in a roundtable (either as panelists or attendees) at the Modern Language Association Annual Conference in 2017. The papers explore the research outcomes from developing and deploying different Digital Humanities projects with Italian Studies materials. The introduction outlines the different methodologies, critiques of digital approaches, and implications for the field offered by the four contributions. The essay ultimately argues that through their humanistic engagement with the technology that drive the projects, the scholars connect their approaches to timely concerns facing all consumers and critics of digital and computational products.
Reflections on the Academic Book of the Future
This article had its genesis in the joint paper we gave at the Scholarly Networks and the Emerging Platforms for Humanities Research and Publication Colloquium in April 2015. At that point, we were at the beginning of the Academic Book of the Future Project, which had been funded to run for two years from October 2014 by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Library. As we write this contribution, the Project has just launched its two final reports, a Project Report by Marilyn Deegan and a Policy Report by Michael Jubb (Deegan, 2017; Jubb, 2017). The Project was conceived of in response to widespread concerns about books, publishing, libraries and the academy. Declining monograph sales, rising serials prices, funding problems, rapidly-changing new technologies, shifting policy landscapes, increasing pressure on academics to do more with less, all contributed to a sense of unease about the health of the academic book in the arts and humanities, and indeed about the health of the disciplines themselves. The Project was run jointly by University College London and King’s College London, with consultancy support from the Research Information Network (academicbookfuture.org). It also drew on expertise from across a widespread community coalition of academics (from students to senior professors), publishers, intermediaries and policy makers. Some hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals have been involved, and many useful deliverables produced. The Project had, and continues to have, considerable impact, and some of its activities, for instance Academic Book Week (acbookweek.com), will continue for the foreseeable future.
Text mining methods are examined and assessed in order to find exact sources of Pico's theses ascribed to Medieval authors in his "Conclusiones nongentae".
Scholarly Networks and Collaborative Practices (Proceedings of the Colloquium held at Brown University on April 16-18, 2015)
This section presents a selection from the proceedings of a colloquium held at Brown University in the spring of 2015. The event was hosted by the Virtual Humanities Lab in the Department of Italian Studies (VHL), in collaboration with the Center for Digital Scholarship in the Brown University Library (CDS), and DARIAH-Italy (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and the Humanities). Its aim was to explore the new types of scholarly output produced when scholars use digital methods to collaborate on, annotate and visualize traditional materials.
Geospatial Visualizations for the Study of Boccaccio
This essay considers the use of mapping and mapping technologies for the benefit of those who study the work and life of Giovanni Boccaccio.
Welcome to the fifth issue of Humanist Studies &the Digital Age entitled Networks and Projects: New Platforms in Digital Humanities. The sections Perspectives and Interventions are devoted to the publication of a selection from the proceedings of a colloquium held at Brown University in the Spring of 2015. These first two sections are presented and introduced by Massimo Riva in his essay on Scholarly Networks and Collaborative Practices. The third section of this issue, Projects, is presented by Crystal Hall in her introduction, Italian Studies and Digital Humanities: Research Outcomes. In the brief notes of my Editorial, I reflect on the idea of “network” as conceptual framework and privileged space of knowledge engaging with Pierre Lévy’s work, and I anticipate the topic of the sixth issue of this journal that will be published in 2019.
This paper presents an original use of Twitter to interpret and rewrite the poems of Francesco Petrarca's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Rvf) implemented within the Oregon Petrarch Open Book OPOB). This activity was partially inspired by the idea of Twitterature developed by Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin; we believe with them that our digital time should develop new and more functional ways of addressing literary texts but at the same time we are convinced that the "burdensome duty of hours spent reading" cannot be eliminated. On the contrary, the new ways of reading in the digital era as we envisage them are the result and consequence of broader and deeper reading activities. We conceived the project of writing 366 tweets, out of the 366 poems that make the last form of Petrarca’s Rvf, as the result of different philological activities, from reading the texts in the original language to consulting manuscripts, translations and intersemiotic renderings of the texts. Before writing the 140 characters that make one tweet we also elaborated paraphrases, summaries and keywords related to the individual poems. Students created the first version of the tweets during the 2011 UO seminar on Re-reading Petrarca’s Rvf in the Digtal Era. The second version was elaborated in the context of a seminar on the same topic during Winter 2014. This paper presents the two versions of the Twitter Edition of Petrarca's Rvf now available in the OPOB and focuses on the philology connected to the latest edition that provided an English translation of the original tweets written in Italian. The actual Italian and English 366 tweets are published in the Appendix to the article.
Copyright (c) 2015 Massimo Lollini, Rebecca Rosenberg https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
From fragment to hypertext: Adding layers of reading
In this paper we will suggest that a hypertextual representation of the text allows us to show different temporal layers of reading and lets us add new ones. We use the notion “layers of reading” as a metaphor to explain how, historically, each reading of a text creates a new layer, an independent “stratum of meaning” -to use a geological term-, that is superimposed to a previous reading. We think the digital edition and the digital reading could create a philosophical methodology, based on the awareness of the historical construction of each layer of reading.
Copyright (c) 2015 Ernesto Priani, Ana María Guzman Olmos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
Digital Readers of Allusive Texts: Ovidian Intertextuality in the 'Commedia' and the Digital Concordance on 'Intertextual Dante'
This essay introduces the notion of a digital concordance as a reading and research tool to explore intertextual passages online, and illustrates how a digital concordance of highly allusive texts can change how we read and research such texts. I take as example the digital concordance on Intertextual Dante, a project on Digital Dante (digitaldante.columbia.edu) developed in collaboration with the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship at Columbia University, which in the first phase highlights the Ovidian intertextuality in Dante’s Divina Commedia. The essay traces the history of the scholarship on Dante’s Ovid, identifying its strengths and limitations, especially of the concordances in print. Since the intertextual passages in the Commedia require a reading not restricted to the obviously corresponding verses, but attentive to the broader textual contexts, I show how the digital concordance on Intertextual Dante greatly facilitates such a contextualized reading. The visualization of the corresponding passages (side by side, highlighted, within context) and the search options (by category of text reuse or by canto/book/poem) help the study of (Ovidian) intertextuality in the Commedia, as illustrated with examples from the site.
Copyright (c) 2015 Julie Van Peteghem https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
From Quill to Mouse: Digitizing the ‘Woman of Letters’ 1861-1922
Abstract: This article describes a project in Italian Digital Women’s Studies, In-visiblewomen.org, which is currently being developed in collaboration with our two universities, and consists of an interpretive, thematic website on the material culture of Italian female intellectuals between 1861 and 1922. We envision In-visiblewomen.org as a tool that allows to investigate women’s agency in promoting social change and the interconnections between women writers’ material culture, their private space, their access to the public sphere and the impact of the new media revolution on women’s social status. Unlike the majority of existing digital projects on women writers, ours is not only a digitized text-bank or a mere collection of bio-bibliographical data. Rather, it will be a multi-layered, interpretive platform stemming from the expert contribution of scholars in the field. Our time boundaries comprise the period between Italian unification (1861) and the beginning of the fascist era (1922). Compared to other historical periods (the Renaissance and the fascist and post-fascist decades, for example) this highly transformative era for women’s cultural production and consumption has inexplicably generated less scholarly attention. Using a commissioned oil painting representing a late nineteenth century woman writer’s virtual study as interface, this project will be the first of its kind in the field of Italian Women Studies. Each object in this ideal study (pen, ink bottle, letters, magazines etc.) will be clickable and will lead to an encyclopedia-type entry. Through the painting, users will be able to access two searchable databases organized hierarchically and interconnected through tagging: a themes database, and an authors database.
Copyright (c) 2015 Ombretta Frau, Cristina Gragnani https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0
As part of the seminar Re-reading Petrarch in the Digital Age –taught at the University of Oregon in Winter 2014– a digital close reading of Francesco Petrarca’s Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta (Rvf) led to a series of parallel and entwined activities and projects. Deeply integrated with the Oregon Petrarch Open Book Project (OPOB), the course was oriented towards the encoding of Petrarca’s masterpiece based on the implementation of a network of different themes (Poet, Laura, Metaphysics Nature Metamorphoses and Urban Culture). The various occurrences and data obtained from the encoding were collected into an online database that is still operating and updatable. The results of this qualitative data collection were also compared with a quantitative computer-based research of selected keywords extracted from the various themes. From the beginning of the seminar, the class was divided into groups and each of them read the Rvf focusing on one of themes chosen while at the same time paying attention to the others. The different groups considered these themes as interrelated and interdependent. The poet is the sphere in which all the topics emerge in their specific connotations. However, his sphere is related to, dependent on and intersected with the other four spheres. The encoding allowed measuring the different manifestations, levels and meanings of the intersecting relationships. The study of the visual interpretation of the Rvf in the Inc. Queriniano G V 15 paralleled the close reading and encoding activity and helped students to develop a visual rendering of their themes and a pointed and original and creative interpretation of Petrarca’s masterpiece.
Copyright (c) 2015 Massimo Lollini, Pierpaolo Spagnolo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0