-- My CV. I was born in Vercelli, Italy, raised in Siracusa, Sicily, and attended university in Naples and Florence, graduating in Philosophy in 1979-80 with a thesis on the German philosopher Karl Loewith and his critique of Heidegger and Nietzsche. While completing a Ph.D. in Italian Literature at Rutgers University, I taught for two years at the University of Sydney, Australia. After graduating (in 1986), I moved back to the States, teaching at various colleges, before moving to Brown, where I have been teaching in the Dept. of Italian Studies since 1990-91 (tenured since 1993).
My print publications include two books on melancholy and hypochondria in 18th- and 19th-century Italian culture, a forthcoming anthology of Contemporary Italian Writers in English translation, and a number of essays on topics ranging from Medieval and early Modern to Contemporary Literature, including several articles (in both Italian and English) on the application of computing to the studying and teaching of Literature.
In the early 1990s, stimulated by my new acquaintance with the work of such colleagues as Robert Coover and George Landow at Brown, I became actively interested in computing for the humanities and more specifically, in the theory and practice of electronic hypertext, from a dual point of view: as a productive pedagogical tool and as a new frontier for fiction writing. Over the past decade, I have linked this interest to my scholarly and pedagogical engagement with a variety of texts, beginning with Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron which I've been teaching, in both Italian and English translation, since 1992.
This new engagement led to the creation of the Decameron Web, an online archive of textual and contextual materials for the study and teaching of Boccaccio's masterpiece. This rewarding collaborative effort with undergraduate and graduate students was crowned by two National Endowment for the Humanities grants in the program of Education and Technology (1999-2003). In close collaboration with the project co-editor, Michael Papio, I now coordinate a small team of young researchers. Along with a pedagogy module specifically designed for teachers and students of the Decameron, our work in progress includes searchable SGML/XML encoded versions of several texts by Boccaccio (in both Italian and English) and a number of images from manuscripts, incunabula and early Modern printed editions of the Decameron and other works by Boccaccio, held at Brown's John Hay and Harvard's Houghton Library.
In addition to the Decameron Web, I am currently involved (as Brown Coordinator) in another web-based collaborative project: the Brown U.- University of Bologna Pico Project, an electronic edition and online commentary of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man (Oratio de hominis dignitate, 1486), considered a philosophical "manifesto" of Renaissance humanism. Recently, I was awarded a one-year grant by the Scholarly Technology Group at Brown for the development of an online edition of Pico's Conclusiones Nongentae. In addition to requiring a variety of scholarly competences, this project presents specific challenges for the electronic representation and visualization of "textual knowledge," ideas formalized in writing and embedded in printed texts. Moreover, given the eminently interdisciplinary nature of the project, my collaborators at STG and I are studying a specific interface that can expedite the collaborative process of annotation, parallel commentaries and translation of Pico's text (with its copious sources) among the team members - also as a potential model for other similar projects.
Currently, I am at work on two projects, in print and online, that address other crucial aspects of the current transition from print to electronic media: namely, the meaning of "encyclopedic learning" in electronic media and the intersecting of narrative art, play and "critical discourse" in cyberculture. The print project is taking the form of a web of essays, tentatively entitled: A Single Art and Science: Incunabula for a Digital Humanism. Reflecting on my own experience with electronic media as research and learning tools, I elaborate on the analogy between the age of early Humanism (1400s), with its revolution in educational systems and the adoption of print technology, and our "post-Humanistic" age, with the development of new media.
The online project, N2K. Narratives for the Next Millennium, still in its very early stages, is geared instead toward classroom practice and pedagogy and is based on the work of Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco. The course connected to this project is conceived as an atelier or workshop, a hybrid between a literature and a creative writing course: with my students, I adopt Calvino's categories of lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity and (consistency) as well as the concepts of hyper-history and hyper-plot derived from Eco, as experimental values for a new type of narrative art and critical writing. Students are invited to follow the multiple threads linking these values (and cognitive models) to the entire realm of literature, as they explore and map it in their individual reading and writing. These experimental values provide the architectural framework for the web site, which will feature the best work of students enrolled in the course, as well as hypertextual and digital narratives by guest artists.
Both of these projects obviously feed into each other, based as they are on the central idea that 21st-century humanism must elaborate new cognitive and representational models, cutting across the arts and the sciences--and a good place to start is the classroom (with the annexed multimedia lab). In my writing and teaching, I am always trying to further articulate my point of view as a member of what I would call the ever growing "post-textual" studies community in the humanities: as members of such a community, we are actively involved in an exciting theoretical and practical experiment with "digital incunabula," equally concerned with the preservation and the critical and historical understanding of our cultural traditions; and enthused by the new cognitive dimensions disclosed to us by digital technologies.
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