We’re closing down the VHL blog, but will keep it online for archiving purposes. Our work on VHL itself, though, continues. If you have input or would like to otherwise contribute, we warmly invite you to contact Massimo Riva using the contact information on the linked page.
Next Wednesday the 17th I’ll be in New York, to attend the presentation of the Richard Lyman Award to one of my favorite computing humanists, Willard McCarty. If you are interested in humanities computing, work in it, and/or know Willard, come show your support and appreciation, not to mention meet interesting people:
If you’d like to attend, please call Martha at 919.549.0661 ext. 156 to get put on the guest list. (It’s free to attend, but they’d like to know how many people are coming, and if you tell them you’re working on something related, they might be able to introduce you to like-minded souls.) And let me know you’ll be there, perhaps we can meet up!
Dear Readers,
I would like to invite you to an upcoming presentation
When: Wednesday, May 3rd, 2 pm
What: “History in the Digital Age: Medieval Chronicler Giovanni Villani Meets the Internet”
Who: Rala Diakite, Matt Sneider and Vika Zafrin
Where: Fitchburg State College, 160 Pearl St. Fitchburg MA / Miller Oval (in Miller Hall)
This talk will provide a quick overview of recent developments in the way historical sources are being presented for use by researchers and students via the internet. This as a preface to a guided tour of the Virtual Humanities Lab, and particularly of the segment dedicated to Giovanni Villani’s Cronica, a fourteenth-century Florentine chronicle. We will explain our encoding strategies and present our work thus far, as well as demonstrating some of the available and soon-to-be available tools on the site. We will conclude with a discussion of the pedagogical potential of our digitized Villani text.
Hope to see you there!
For further information, please contact Rala Diakite at 978-665-4706 or rdiakite@fsc.edu
Dear colleague / Caro collega,
Please pass this on to interested students and peers working in Italian Studies, medieval history and any other related fields.
La preghiamo di distribuire questo annuncio agli studenti, dottorandi e colleghi potenzialmente interessati. N.B.: La versione italiana di questo annuncio segue quella inglese.
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The Virtual Humanities Lab (VHL) at Brown University is seeking online collaborators to participate in verifying indexes generated from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Esposizioni sopra la Comedìa di Dante and Giovanni Villani’s Cronica Fiorentina.
Participants may be qualified graduate and undergraduate students and/or their instructors. Reading knowledge of Italian and the desire to do some literary/historical research is required. Group work as well as individual work is welcomed. Participation in this endeavor, while rewarding in itself, also provides excellent training in the fields of medieval Italian studies, history, humanities computing and philology.
Further information is available at:
http://dev.stg.brown.edu/projects/VHL/help/guidelines_indexing.pdf
General information about the project, as well as its texts and indexes, can be accessed from
http://dev.stg.brown.edu/projects/VHL/
We hope you will join us in this exciting venture.
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Il Laboratorio per le Scienze Umane Virtuali (Virtual Humanities Lab) della Brown University ricerca collaboratori a distanza (dottorandi, ricercatori o docenti) disponibili a verificare l’accuratezza degli indici dei seguenti testi generati su codifica xml: Giovanni Boccaccio, Esposizioni sopra la Comedìa di Dante; Giovanni Villani, Cronica Fiorentina. Si offre la possibilità di contribuire attivamente ad una comunità di formazione e ricerca, all’intersezione degli studi storico-filologico-letterari e dell’informatica umanistica.
Per ulteriori informazioni sul progetto:
http://dev.stg.brown.edu/projects/VHL/
http://dev.stg.brown.edu/projects/VHL/help/guidelines_indexing.pdf
Many apologies for my protracted silence. Would you accept some exciting news as penance?
The texts are entirely online, as are people and places indexes for both the Esposizioni and the Cronica. I have also put up an About page, which links to guidelines for index verification (PDF) and for annotation (PDF), and the beginnings of a FAQ. Feedback is most welcome on all of these. Please note that all of the above links lead to a development server, which may be unstable at any time. Also, some things are working less smoothly than others; we’re working on that. At this time there are no major problems with display and encoding.
Today I also sent out a Call for Participation. This was mailed to a long list of individual addresses as well as several mailing lists (I’m pretty sure we’ve got the Humanist, Digital Medievalist, Mediev-L, AAIS and Italian Studies lists covered). If you would like to help us disseminate the announcement, please feel free to forward it to potentially interested parties. I will post the CFP separately.
Rala and Matt’s poster on their Villani work was accepted at Digital Humanities 2006. The same conference has accepted Massimo’s and my paper on collaborative scholarship. In addition, a couple of VHL-related talks will be taking place in April and May; more information about those is forthcoming.
Paul has begun working on the search engine. I can’t wait to play with it.
This is progress, folks. We’re now public! Now, we wait and see if others will join us.
It is time to resume our public discussion (this is the content of a recent report Vika and I sent to NEH): now that the first phase of intensive encoding is completed, over the next few weeks we will concentrate our effort on designing the home page and, along with it, the second major component of the VHL, the Virtual Seminar Room. There will be a single “door” into the VHL, with links to its various components, including links to the Catasto/Tratte databases, which won’t be “integrated” into the VHL but will be part of the research and pedagogical activities made accessible through the VSR. The VSR will be the entry point for a number of collaborative activities based on our encoded texts (including the Decameron) and made possible by the capabilities of the VHL platform (annotation engine, etc.). The idea, as you know, is to combine traditional study and research activities (the reading and interpretation of texts), distance collaboration and the digital editing process, broadly conceived: participating scholars and students will be able to contribute annotations, participate in the process of semantic encoding etc., as well as interact and communicate with each other in this virtual space (we are planning to add a chat room). The VSR will thus provide a testing and training ground for those collaborative practices made possible by the digital platform. Feedback from scholars and students will also determine the evolution of the VHL, the additional tools, texts and functions that we will include in the future.
Of course, during this brainstorming phase, feedback from every member of the teams (Esposizioni, Pico and Villani) is vital: help Vika and I conceptualize the kind of activities that your specific scholarly community (literary scholars, historians, philologists and philosophers etc.) may find most useful and compelling; and help us envision how these activities could become part of graduate or ug. seminars and courses focused on, or including one or more of our texts.
A quick note to wish you all happy holidays and let you know that Francesco Borghesi and I will be making a presentation about VHL at a conference entitled Digital Philology - Problems and Perspectives, which will be held at the University of Hamburg, Germany, on Jan. 20-22, 2006.
Upon thinking further about the search functions for the Villani text, I was wondering/hoping that our encoding would allow us to make searches that involve those encoded elements. Simple string searches may currently be done on the OVI database, where Villani’s Nuova Cronica also resides. Will we be able to search for occurrences of Person/gender/female within the same paragraph with the word “Francia”, or examples of Person / position / priore in close proximity to Theme / econ? Will this open up a world of complexity that will cause the program to crash, or is this exactly what we are aiming for?
As we look more closely at the Villani encoding, we are looking to clean up and simplify as much as possible. Some series of attributes are naturally infinite, such as the names of persons or names of places. On the other hand, we have one set of attributes “natura”, under type=”forza”, under the element “theme”. They are as follows:
Giustizia, forca, Condanna, Multa confinamento, Prigione, Guerra, Guerra esilio, ribellione, attacco, Assalto, Confiscazione, Mutilazione, Incendio, Assassinio, presa citta, Guerra presa citta, Congiuro, Arresto tortura, Assissinio mutilamento, Assassinio, Mutilamento cannabalismo, Esilio, Guerra presacastello, Assassinio, Blocco, Guerra, Assedio, Ostaggio, Assedio, Ribellione Guerra, Condanna esilio, Scomunica, Tortura forca, Mutilamento, Confinamento, Furto, Tortura multa, ribellione, Guerra cattura, Presacitta, Presacastello, Giustizia, Confina, Forca cattura, forca condanna
Would it be helpful or not helpful to combine these into groupings? Groupings like punizione civile, punizione ecclesiastico, guerra, for example. Would that add unneccesary complexity? Or would it be best to leave these forms of force in their original wordings as we did with the person: “name” attributes, and give up trying to classify them.
I imagine a sort of grim catalogue of violence, and index of evils that could be drawn from this encoding. Villani has his spicy side too. Any suggestions welcome.
I’ve been working on Boccaccio’s citations of other literary sources in the Esposizioni, and was wondering how we were going to incorporate them into the online text. How about if I add the references to sources in as annotations to the section of the text that we have up now (Esp., Acc., I-IV)? I thought I would simply add the references as they appear in Padoan’s notes to the Mondadori edition (Milan, 1965), and then others more erudite can come after me and make further comments or corrections. Or would it be better to wait and encode them instead?
I agree with Mike that the Balzac example is an interesting one, although it clearly applies to a corpus (oeuvre) by a single author. From this point of view, let’s remember that VHL is not a “single author” project - I find more affinities with the WWP or the EEBO. Of course, the search engine is a valuable tool for annotating. However, what our search engine should be able to do, eventually, is to maximize the possibilities embedded in our “differentiated” encoding. For example: crossreferencing names, places, dates, visualizing text strings and paragraphs etc., but also allowing to perform more sophisticated searches for authorial, thematic, semantic/rhetorical structures as we identify and encode them in the various texts (what fields would be appropriate for these other tasks?). Our goal is to enable a comparative and explorative approach to texts that belong to the same cultural context but also to different typologies of writing and rhetorical genres (we have chosen these texts precisely because of the wide spectrum they represent). How does the search engine help us reach that goal? Another question raised by Mike: keeping commentary and text separated is ok, but isn’t encoding a form of embedded commentary? Does Mike mean annotations? Will we be able to search annotations as well - in relation to text - once we have a significant amount of annotations? I suppose we can proceed by stages and add functionality and power to our engine as we progress in the encoding and annotating process. However, in designing it, one of the fundamental prerequisites we should keep in mind is its “expandibility” - to keep it open to the possibilities that lie ahead of us, including potential applications in the seminar room.
1) There is a paragraph broken in two: lines 4645-47. This paragraph should be unified.
2) Line 4713. As far as I know, Costanza d’Altavilla was not the daughter of Guglielmo di Sicilia. She was daughter of Ruggero II and mother of Federico II. Also in other cases Boccaccio makes mistakes of this sort, but I guess this kind of problems will be dealt with when annotation begins.
Roberto Bacci
Anticipating Paul’s work on the search engine, a question for the text scholars:
What do you want a semantic search engine operating on a text to do for you?
Please have one or more texts in mind, regardless of whether they’re texts we’re putting up or those that interest you personally. The functionality, however, should be generalized. (For example: want to search for words in proximity to each other. How much proximity? Occurring within 3/5/10/? words of each other. Or: want to search for words with similar spellings, like love and lov’d and loves.
Examples of search engines for various corpora can be found here. The features you want may or may not be available on them, and you are certainly not limited to what you see – this is just to get you going.
Last week, Inside Higher Ed published an article by Gina Hiatt titled “We Need Humanities Labs.” Gina is the mastermind behind the Academic Ladder site, and also runs academiblog. She is a psychologist by training and does dissertation and tenure coaching for a living.
Conferences and conventions offer important opportunities for scholarly dialogue, as do online blogs. However, there are limitations to conferences (too infrequent) and blogs. What I am advocating is injecting into the humanities department some of the freewheeling dialogue found in the halls outside the conference presentation or in some of the better scholarly blogs.
[…]
People should be encouraged to attend with partly formed thoughts, poorly written paragraphs, or just an idea they want to develop. The idea is to think of all such scholarly dialogue as a laboratory. Ideas are cooked up, thrown in the test tube, and mixed with human interaction, creativity and motivation. These experiments will produce better written and less painfully produced dissertations or publications, and might engender a “creative humanities hothouse.”
Auspicious, that I only discovered Wikiversity today: voting that will determine whether the project will go ahead will end at midnight UTC!
The purpose of the Wikiversity project, which will ultimately reside at www.wikiversity.org, is to build an electronic institution of learning that will be used to test the limits of the wiki model both for developing electronic learning resources as well as for teaching and for conducting research and publishing results (within a policy framework developed by the community).
More information is at the link above. The idea needs work, and much development and goodwill, but is promising. I would certainly be excited to participate.
Please take a moment to create* a (free) new account and vote if you’re even remotely interested in this; they need a two-thirds majority to launch the beta. At the time of this writing it’s 197 Yes to 83 No, which is encouraging but awfully close.
*The interface for creating a new account is a bit misleading. Just fill in the username and password (and email, if you want) fields, and click on “Create new account.”
I’ve drafted a first version of the Guidelines for Annotating VHL Texts. It is available here [PDF]. I’d like to invite comments on it from now until Wednesday Nov. 2nd, at which point the final version will go up in the help section of the annotating interface. The document will also be linked from the discussion forum.
It’s good to hear that our annotations can include links to other web pages. Might they also include images? I’m annotating the war between the English and French. As you might imagine, it would be useful to provide campaign maps and some of the many images I’ve found.
I have begun work on the annotation of Book Thirteen, choosing to gloss first those chapters that deal with Queen Joan of Naples, the spicy intrigues that occurred around the murder of her husband Andrea of Hungary (exciting also because they cause Villani to explode into unprecedented fits of moral outrage). More generally, I will annotate the succeeding chapters dealing with the episode, and Villani’s treatment of the reaction of the Hungarian royalty to these events.
I am looking forward to highlighting the connections between Villani’s portrayal of these events and Boccaccio’s representation of Queen Joan in his De Mulieribus Claris of 1362. Joan has a prominent place in this group of illustrious women, being the end point in the series of 104 biographies.
One question, and this for the technical staff…can the annotations include weblinks to other documents? I hope the answer will be yes.
In the meantime - - and this is for everyone - - I am trying to locate the e-text of De Mulieribus Claris in English, Italian and Latin. If anyone happens to know reliable etexts and where they reside, please let me know. - - Rala
While reading the posts on the encoding of Villani, several not-too-pleasant memories came to mind from months of encoding the Decameron. I too was desperately looking forward to using the encoding, like Matt, for pedagogical purposes, but once Dynaweb went awol all that work went down the drain, leaving us with no ability to run cross-searches on the text. (I still lose sleep thinking about it.) So, this leads me to pose a couple questions, which - I hope - lead in productive directions. Forgive me if I’m missing something simple.
1. Is there a plan within the framework of the VHL to recuperate this functionality in the Decameron’s part of the project? If so, could it be done before the course starts up in January? Indeed, is there any way to tweak it so that it will come back to life within what Paul is doing?
2. How reliant are we now with the new projects upon an external structure like this? I would hate to go through all of this only to have it die a Dynaweb death.
Hopefully,
M
Just a quick note to add that the “theme” element includes, as values for the attribute “type”, the terms “oralita’” and “visivo” that Rala mentioned in her blog.