[updated 2004-09-08]

Welcome to the Virtual Humanities Lab! With this weblog, we hope to both document our progress and facilitate feedback on our work.

The VHL is a two-year project sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. We are based at Brown University, and the project builds on the work done in the Scholarly Technology Group and in the Department of Italian Studies, in collaboration with scholars elsewhere.

Over the past few years, a series of freely accessible networked resources for late Medieval and Early Modern Italian Studies have been developed at Brown University. They include:

• the Decameron Web, a growing online archive of textual and contextual materials for the studying and teaching of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1375), conceived as an encyclopedic gateway into late Medieval life and culture;
• the Pico Project, a collaborative online edition and commentary of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on Human Dignity (1486), focused on Pico’s idea of a fundamental convergence among major theological and philosophical traditions (Muslim, Jewish and Christian);
• the Florentine Tratte and Catasto, a searchable database of tax information for the city of Florence in 1427-29, with information about office holders of the Florentine Republic during its 250-year history (1282-1532).

More recently a new project was launched: Heliotropia, a peer-reviewed electronic journal created to provide a widely and readily available forum for research and interpretation to an international community of Boccaccio scholars. Together, these projects provide valuable primary tools for studying and teaching the literary, intellectual, economic and social history of 14th- and 15th-century Italy.

We are now ready to enter a new phase. With the support of the NEH, we plan to develop diverse digital resources into an experimental model for collaborative scholarship and pedagogy. What we envision is a highly interactive website where educators, scholars, students and other interested users will find not only a wealth of information about the civic experience and the literary and intellectual culture of Early Modern Italy (Florence in particular), but also a variety of tools for collaborative teaching and research – specifically, annotation and discussion of primary texts – organized as a multidisciplinary “virtual laboratory” for the humanities.

Because of its pioneering history in humanities computing, its open curriculum, and its dual identity as a university-college where teaching and research are often intimately intertwined, Brown is an ideal venue for such an experiment, able to act as a useful testing ground for a wide range of institutions, from small community colleges to leading research universities.

The VHL will be organized into a Virtual Editing House and a Virtual Seminar Room and will provide a platform for a number of shared activities, ranging from scholarly editions and publications to team-taught online workshops and seminars. Scholars working in teams, from a variety of international locations, will be able to contribute to user-oriented annotated digital editions, commentaries and interpretations of key texts of the Italian humanist tradition (see below). Educators from anywhere will be able to adopt and test these digital editions in their multidisciplinary teaching. We hope that the VHL weblog will also become a forum used by scholars and educators for discussions about current developments in contemporary humanities scholarship and pedagogy, including reviews and critical evaluations of related projects and resources available online.

The new texts we will be putting up include Giovanni Boccaccio’s Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante and portions of Giovanni Villani’s Croniche. In addition, we will apply VHL’s Virtual Editing House tools to the texts available through the Pico Project and, in the future, the Decameron Web texts. Heliotropia, the online journal of Boccaccio studies currently in its second year of publication, will also be part of VHL.

Many people have come together to make VHL possible. Our contributors, and your hosts at this weblog, are:

• Guyda Armstrong, Consultant, Esposizioni (email)
• Francesco Borghesi, Consultant, Pico Project (email)
• Rala Diakite, Consultant and Encoder, Villani (email)
• Cristiana Fordyce, Consultant, Esposizioni (email)
• Michael Papio, Consultant, Heliotropia Editor (email)
• Massimo Riva, Principal Investigator (email | web)
• Matthew Sneider, Consultant and Encoder, Villani (email)
• Vika Zafrin, Project Director (email | web)

Other contributors to the project include:

• Dino Buzzetti, University of Bologna (Pico Project consulting)
• Paul Caton, Scholarly Technology Group (technical expertise)
• Elli Mylonas, Scholarly Technology Group (technical expertise)

One of the major goals of this weblog is for our work process to be transparent; if some details of what we are doing are obscure, please leave us a comment or send e-mail. We hope you’ll enjoy the reading and contribute your thoughts.