I am encoding glosses, names and a few themes in the Esposizioni:

a) Glosses.
I am glossing two kinds of terms that Boccaccio himself explains and defines in the text. In our editions, these terms are either:
- in quotation marks
- in italics
For Boccaccio’s explanations of terms that do not fall in neither of the above categories, I am leaving comments for Cristiana and all other collaborators: later we will have to decide whether or not also these terms deserve a gloss.

b) Names.
I am encoding four types of names, with or without glosses explaining their meanings in Boccaccio’s own words. Names can refer to a:
- Person. Yes/no subcategories: collective (ex. “fiorentini”, “centauri”), mythological, biblical (Vika and I have decided to consider “biblical” names as part of the “mythical” category as well; “mythical” are also fictional characters, for example Dante-personaggio as opposed to Dante-autore, when the distinction is applicable). For the moment, I have decided not to encode all the different names for “God” (”Dio”,”Creatore” etc.)
- Place. Yes/no subcategories: mythological (non-”real” biblical place names included)
- Myth-entity. Mythical characters that are also names for places (ex. “Oceano”)
- work (of art/literature) Ex. Eneide, Timeo… With specification of the author. I am encoding the references to “Divina Commedia” as “comedia”, and I am not considering the three separate “cantiche” as works in themselves (thus I am not encoding the occurrences of “inferno”, “purgatorio”, “paradiso” as parts of the “Divina Commedia”, but I do encode them when they are names of places).
For the moment, I am not encoding names of places, persons etc. when they appear in citations in languages other that Italian (for ex. Latin).

c) Themes.
I began encoding some passages according to very general abstract theme-categories such as: time, sexuality, health etc. I have labelled these categories with the mark “temrob” (=”tema-roberto”), that is: those are themes identified by Roberto, all of you are free to add others or discuss changes, sub-divisions etc. A theme suggested by Cristiana, for example, could be marked “temcri”, and the whole matter be discussed in a meeting later on (but I think it is important to start identifying these themes now, just to have a general idea and classification…)

As you can see, this work of encoding is already implying some issues to discuss and choices to make. It goes without saying that your opinion is more than welcome. Other issues and problems I have encountered so far, and on which I would like to hear your comments, are the following:
- I wrote “check” in those cases when I am not 100% sure of a certain information, for example the author of a certain work, whether or not a character is real or mythological etc.
- When Boccaccio refers to biblical psalms, he uses expressions such as “il Salmista scrive”. This problem could be solved in many different ways. I have chosen to encode “il Salmista” not as a “work” but as a person (mythological, biblical).

It’s been an eventful month here at VHL HQ. Guyda and I have just submitted a paper proposal to a publication, and separately from that I’ve submitted a couple of others, for conferences. We’ve set up people with encoding, which for now seems to be going well. Have met with Rala and Matt regarding Villani – I’ll let them expound on that. Esposizioni work seems to be going well too: I have repeatedly met with Roberto, who is kicking pretty seriously on the encoding; and Cristiana, Guyda and Mike have been researching aspects of the text.

Paul and I have started talking about the overall structure of the interface. For now, we’re focusing on the seminar room features, which will be the most widely used; he is thinking about back-end architecture and I am playing with layouts. For now, there’s a lot of preliminary dirty work on this front; as soon as there’s something concrete to share, we’ll post.

For the benefit of the blogghisti, I thought it would be appropriate to send a quick msg describing my latest activities on the Esposizioni. I’ve put together the list of confer’s related to the pre-Boccaccio commentators for Canto XIII and am now working on the Accessus. Canto I will follow. I hope to have something to share by Vergil’s birthday (October 15).

There’s an article in today’s Guardian online about academic weblogging; there are lots of links, and some thoughts about issues such as educational applications, questions of copyright, and the implications for research and peer-review.

I received my laurea in Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures (Scandinavian and British) in 1997 from the Department of Literature and Philosophy at the University of Bologna. I have translated poems by contemporary Italian authors such as Caproni, Luzi, Rosselli, Sanguineti into Norwegian for the volume Poetisk Modernisme, Oslo, Det norske Samlaget, 1995 (in collaboration with E. Jensen and G.Vesaas). In 1997, I began working with the publishing house Longanesi & C. in Milan as translator and consultant for Scandinavian, British and American literature, and translated novels by Marianne Fredriksson and Jostein Gaarder into Italian. I was an Italian language instructor at the University of Georgia (1999-2001) and since the fall of 2003 I have been a graduate student and TA at Brown University. Main research interest: Occultism in 20th century European culture (in particular the revival of Renaissance Magic).

Alan Liu’s new book The Laws of Cool: The Culture of Information looks really interesting. I’ve put in a purchase request at our library, and am thinking of buying it myself. (If it were in stock at the Brown Bookstore, it would’ve been an impulse purchase. Luckily for my finances, they’re fresh out.)

The ultimate message of The Laws of Cool is that “cool” may be the most authentic response of contemporary culture to postindustrial knowledge work because it holds open a reserve of counter- or anti-knowledge (an “ethos of the unknown”), but nevertheless in its current form cool is often also know-nothing, narrow, shallow, self-centered, cruel, and coopted. Laws of Cool posits that the task of the humanities and arts at the present time is to educate the cool to use technology in a way that mediates between knowledge work and a fuller lifework glimpsed in historically other lives and works.

I liked this quote so much that I printed it out. It’s so easy to get carried away in the flashy-toy aspect of technology, especially before we have a good idea of what kind of work and expertise is required in order to use the flashiest of tech toys. It’s more challenging, and I think more interesting, to make things that are both elegant and supremely useful; either one of these taken separately is a common occurrence, but together they can be hard to find.

I look forward to reading Alan’s book. Thanks for the pointer, Scott!

You can find info. on my research, publications and teaching @: Italian Studies, Brown U.

Currently, I am on leave in Venice, Italy, working (among other things) on a book tentatively entitled “A Single Art and Science. Toward a Digital Humanism.” In this collection of essays directly emerging from my experience with electronic media, I discuss current perspectives on humanities scholarship and pedagogy, in the age of digital incunabula. I envision this weblog (and, of course, the project of which it is part) as an ideal forum for discussing and “testing” some of the ideas my book is trying to develop and I look forward to your comments and feedback.

Ben Hammersley links to the Pico Project, with the byline “Pico della Mirandola. The Florentine renaissance bad-ass alchemist mofo.”

It’s the next best thing to being slashdotted.

James Cummings, on the Digital Medievalist mailing list, mentioned this project about the Cistercian Order based at the University of Sheffield in the UK. It’s an impressive, well-done site: informative, visually uncluttered and smooth. Check out especially the Multimedia section, with its informative little Flash movies and picture tours of the abbeys. Well done.

Meanwhile, the call for papers is out for ACH/ALLC 2005.

Thanks to Ethan Fremen’s help in setting up our versioning system, we have started work on the Esposizioni. At the moment, our list of points to focus on includes the following:

• basic structural elements, such as chapter divisions, the divisions between literal and allegorical exposition in each chapter, paragraphs and milestones (following the numeration established in the critical edition);
• proper names, along with contextual information about the people, places and entities they represent;
• citations from other authors quoted by Boccaccio and notes as to the erroneous nature of some of these citations (with information about their authors and the works in which they appear – in some cases, the quotation is anonymous, and we have found that these tend to be either proverbial sayings or Boccaccian constructions intended to give personal statements a more general import);
• Greek and Latin terms and their meanings, to be indexed;
• the many terms, Italian as well as foreign, that Boccaccio treats as lemmas, explaining their meaning in detail to his audience, and the definitions themselves; these lemmae will also be indexed, and the glosses cross-referenced to them – particularly useful in cases where Boccaccio defines terms more than once;
• rhetorical devices explicitly and implicitly used by Boccaccio;
• the complex rhetorical structure that Boccaccio lays out every so often, and whether he follows through;
• digressions, in which Boccaccio stops addressing Dante’s text directly and spends, at times, entire pages addressing a broad topic of interest to him (for example, poetry)

Guyda has agreed to tackle Boccaccio’s citations of other authors. Roberto has started on the encoding of terms for the index. Cristiana is researching and annotating Boccaccio’s rhetorical devices, as well as the highly irregular rhetorical structure of the work. The main focus right now are the Accessus and the two expositions of Canto I.

What’re we missing? Are there other elements of the work that will be absolutely necessary to encode on a first pass, that are missing from the above bulleted list? What about a wish list, things we could keep in mind for encoding in the future?

I am the VHL Project Director, on a two-year leave of absence from my PhD program in Humanities Computing here at Brown. My dissertation, RolandHT, explores a semi-fictional character’s* development all over Europe and the Americas over the last thousand years or so. As you can probably imagine, that’s a lot of material originally created in a diverse set of media. Consequently, it was unthinkable to combine all of this material and research the Roland corpus until relatively recently. I am encoding the Roland corpus semantically in XML, tracing the themes and imagery that recur throughout this corpus.

My collaborator Ethan Fremen and I have developed a prototype of RolandHT. It will be made public shortly. Incidentally, Ethan has been instrumental in helping us set up the versioning system for VHL work, and is graciously providing server space and a repository for us to work in until we set up our own. For this, I and the rest of the team are very grateful.

My broader research interests will hopefully be clear from the posts I will be making; I am particularly fascinated with scholarly encoding “from the hip,” from the details that got us interested in the first place outward to the broader structures, using encoding as a notetaking device and then systematizing it. I’m a big fan of playing with our texts first and keeping track of the larger encoding system that emerges, instead of trying to impose an unrelated encoding system first and then tweaking it to fit the primary source. This approach is proving especially useful in the beginning stages of tackling a text as large and multifaceted as the Esposizioni.

     *The Wikipedia article should be taken with a grain of salt, but is a good introduction.

A major conference on paratexts will be held in Italy this November: I dintorni del testo: approcci alle periferie del libro. It’s a huge, weeklong event, with the first three days in Rome (15-17 November 2004), followed by two days in Bologna (18-19 November). To judge by the programme, the conference will cover all types of paratexts from the first printed books to the electronic age; there are several papers on digital resources and electronic editions, including one by George Landow on Hypertext as Paratext. The provisional programme is here, and the conference home page here
(all text in Italian).

I received my PhD in Medieval Romance Languages and Literatures at Boston College. From 2001 to 2003, I was the NEH Decameron Web Project Director in the Department of Italian Studies at Brown University. From 2003 to 2004, I was a post-doctoral fellow in the same department working on the Esposizioni, and the Decameron Web. Presently, I am a Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. My areas of research are Boccaccio, Cavalcanti, and the Florentine intellectuals of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. My research interests are: rhetoric, linguistics and the medieval art of preaching. I am also a member of the editorial board of Heliotropia.
For the VHL, I work on the Esposizioni   with particular attention to the Florentine audience and the reception of Boccaccio’s commentary. Being an editor for the Esposizioni allows me to dive into a newly found passion: markup theory.

I finished my PhD in Italian Studies at Brown in 1998 with a dissertation on Masuccio Salernitano and am currently Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. My current research interests include Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, the Italian novella and the teaching of literature in the hypertext environment. Publications include Keen and Violent Remedies: Social Satire and the Grotesque in Masuccio Salernitano’s Novellino (2000), Concordance to the Decameron (2001) and articles on Dante, Boccaccio, Masuccio, the novella, Fellini and the Tavianis. I’m editor of Heliotropia, online editor of Lectura Dantis, co-editor of the Progetto Pico and two NEH-funded projects: the Decameron Web and the present Virtual Humanities Lab. My work on this latter project will be directed principally toward the Esposizioni.

UC Berkeley has a new Center for New Media. Everything from detailed descriptions of relevant course offerings to an exciting-looking events program (David Byrne talks there next March – oh, wow) to a listing of research projects being conducted in the Center. Definitely worth a look. Thanks for the heads-up, Andrea!

My name is Francesco Borghesi and I recently earned a doctorate in Italian Studies at Brown. My fields of research are mainly medieval and Renaissance intellectual history, philosophy and theology. My current research is focused on Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and the critical edition of his letters. Furthermore I am working on a research project regarding the idea of “concordia” in the late middle ages and the Renaissance.
Currently I am Frances A. Yates Short-Term Research Fellow at the Warburg Institute in London.

A blog to introduce myself.

My name is Matthew Sneider and I am an historian of 15th and 16th century Italy. I am currently an assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. My research has focused on institutions of charity in the city and countryside of Bologna–principally their economic activities and their links with local systems of political power. I am currently planning an expansion of my research south to Florence.

I will be working with Rala on the encoding and “contextualization” of Giovanni Villani’s “Cronica”.

For the benefit of those readers outwith the VHL, I should introduce myself and my research interests. I’m currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh, and before that, I was Mellon Research Fellow in the Department of Italian Studies at Brown from 2001-2003. I work on Boccaccio, and have three main areas of research interest: Boccaccio and Dante, the history of Boccaccio in English translation; and the production of Boccaccio editions from manuscript culture to the digital age.

For the VHL, I’m going to be working on the new online edition of the Esposizioni, in particular on its literary sources. Right now, Vika and I are writing up a paper we wrote about the electronic Esposizioni for the 2003 Texts/Commentaries conference, for submission to The Digital Medievalist Journal.

What else? I generally work from a feminist critical perspective, and sometimes, if circumstances permit, take a feminist activist approach (e.g., in translation studies). Further details of my current research project can be found here.