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.

Hello all. A further update on Villani.

I spoke with Vika this previous Wednesday about the modifications needed for the encoding: the variant spellings and the elimination of non-semantic words in the encoding. I have corrected the former and I am working on the latter. An encoding scheme follows at the end of this blog.

Rala and I had a telephone meeting last week about the process of annotation. We had already decided to encode sections of the text dealing with themes of particular interest to us and, we believe, to potential users of the text. Rala has decided to tackle those sections dealing with the Angevins in Southern Italy and Cola di Rienzo while I have been working on chapters dealing with the war between the French and the English.

1. ru=rubric

2. ch=chapter (NUMBER=”the number of the chapter”)

3. body=body

4.date=date (DATEVIL=”day, month, year”)

5.pb=place name or human construction (TYPE=”general description like ‘fiume’, ‘palazzo’, ‘citta’”, LOCATION=”the location of the place or construction”, NAME=”villani’s name for the place or construction”)

6.person=living individuals, non-living individuals, figures from classical literature or the bible, collective family names, collective groups, collective offices (TYPE=”descriminates between the above categories”, GENDER=”the gender of an individual”, ECCLSTATUS=”any ecclesiastical office held by an individual “, ROLE=”any office held by an individual”, SOCSTATUS=”Villani’s description of social status or our own when absolutely clear”, TITLE=”Villani’s application of a title or our own when absolutely clear”, TOPONYM=”any place name associated with an individual”, NAME=”the name of the individual or group”

7.source=citation by Villani (TYPE=”discriminates between such types of sources as biblical text, classical citation, proverbs, letters, or overheard/reported speech”, AUTHOR=”the author if known or relevant”, ORIGLANGUAGE=”the original language”, VILLANILANGUAGE=”the language used by Villani”

8.theme=recurrent themes in the Cronica (TYPE=”discriminates between themes–examples include ‘forza’ (the use of force), ‘gov’ (actions of government), ‘disastronat’ (disasters), ‘portente’ (portents or omens), ‘villmorale’ (Villani moralizing), ‘econ’ (economic matters)”, NATURE=”descriptions of the matter–examples include ‘guerra’ (war), ‘forca’ (execution), ‘moneta’ (sum of money)”, AGENT=”if relevant, the name of the pary acting”, OBJECT=”if relevant the name of the party acted upon”

As we enter the next phase of the Pico Project (now migrating into VHL), a few issues are worth addressing. There are about 35-40 scholars worldwide now willing to participate in the annotation process. Needless to say, for this process to be successful, specific guidelines must be set in place (which we are currently discussing). For instance, a smaller group of scholars, located in Spain, Mexico and Argentina, are planning to work on the first ever translation of Conclusiones CM into Spanish. This brings up the broader question of whether translation (from Latin or Italian into English and Spanish) may become a consistent and relevant feature of VHL. For example, while we initially assumed that annotations to the Latin text would be done in English, we cannot exclude the possibility that scholars may prefer to write annotations in Italian or Spanish (or Latin, or French). On the technical side, Vika suggested that the Forum would be the appropriate medium in which issues rising from translation may be addressed. I look forward to Vika posting her thoughts about this.

During the last week of encoding, I have been dealing with a bunch of “double names” (or even “triple names”). The typical example is a character that had (fairly accurate) equivalents in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, and then sometimes a “third” name in medieval Christianity. A fex examples will make this point clearer: Medusa-Gorgone, Furie-Eumenidi, Parche-Fate-Fato etc. In these cases, for the glosses, we employ the tool seealso=”", which could be useful for names as well.
Roberto Bacci

Speaking as the other half of the Villani team, I am sure that Matt will agree that the encoding is a lonely job, anf that it is much a relief to bring our work out into the open where we can benefit by the comments of those interested. I am looking forward to the new phase of annotation, but in the meantime, I am also thinking of test questions we could “ask” of the newly encoded text… One type of input that I would like to solicit is also of this nature. Perhaps interested users could pose questions whose answers are potentially covered by our encoding scheme. For example: “Can we find out what Villani knew about the geography of France?” or “What women are represented in the text and what are their characterstics?” “What can we find out about Florence’s war expenses?”

I would also like to say one or two things about the encoding, in anticipation of a longer, more thorough document outlining our encoding strategies.

1) I found the NAME category to be exciting, expecially because of the many women that seemed to emerge from the text, women identified without proper names, but as wives, sisters, and daughters of others. Hopefully the annnotation stage will bring these women to light.

2) The PB category, for me, was the most frustrating, since my knowledge of historical geography is less than perfect. I hope in the annotation stage to replace many of the “check” entries with real data, standardize some of the place names, and even create a map if possible.

3) Encoding for DATE, although less than thrilling, I hope will be useful. We encoded very precisely, down to day and hour. I am confident that we may find correspondences with other texts, allowing us to come closer to an understanding of Villani’s sources. Additionally, there are elements of the dating of composition of the text that one may investigate using dates, especially when Villani mentions events ahead or behind. I had a problem encoding this last aspect, and hope to tackle it before we are through.

4) ECON is a category that might be useful to economic historians, including references to any matter pertaining to money (fines, prices, texes, war booty, etc.) Villani’s chapters on the “entrate” and “uscite”of Florence have long been of interest, but this information, now pulled together from diverse areas of the Nuova Cronaca, will provide a broader base for inquiry.

5)VILLANAUTH is a category which includes Villani’s references to the text itself and his role as author. Encoded are, thus, changes of subject, ending of a subject, references to previous or future subjects, and Villani’s comments on how he decides to treat certain matters. Villani’s manipulation of the text, his directing of the reader’s attention, his awareness of himself as an author are all of interest here. VILLANMORAL is similar (but probably a subset?), referring only to Villani’s moral commentary on events.

6) Finally, VISIVO and ORALITA’ are two categories with which I attempted to encode Villani’s references to visual signs (paintings, banners, insignia etc.),and his references to oral culture (parlamenti, canzoni, il “grido” del popolo, sermoni, arringhe, etc.). I find these especially exciting, since it is quite simple to determine which parts of the text go into these categories, whereas the average user would never spontaneously manage to create a list of words to search that would elicit a full set of results.

I am looking forward to your imput and will soon be posting regarding the upcoming annotation work on Villani.

I’ve been thinking about what to do next with the Villani text. Considering we’ve been dealing in detail with the Esposizioni, the work we need to do between now and putting Villani online should be simple and quite similar to what we’ve done before, shouldn’t it? Well, yes and no: our two Villani editors-and-encoders are both at institutions other than Brown, not particularly close to each other. I’ll be getting a bit more involved in Villani as well, documenting the process as thoroughly as possible. All of this points to the blog as a good, systematic communication system that hopefully opens us up to critique and other helpful input from colleagues we don’t even know we have.

So, this is a first attempt at a to-do list for Villani. It’s tentative, but I’m pretty sure we have to do the first two bullet points before moving on to other things.

• Go through dtd and correct the typos: I’ve used the power of software to create a DTD (Document Type Definition, where the formal rules for encoding are stored). We won’t actually be using the DTD to prescribe encoding, but making it automatically has helpfully revealed some typos in the XML, which need to be corrected. More on this below.
• Debug attributes: A bunch of unconventional (to me) stuff was done with the encoding; some attributes have more than one value and we decided to use blank spaces to represent that (for example, <person role=”duke captain”>). But we must go through all the attributes again and delete any stray spaces: for example, it would be confusing to write <person role=”duke captain ruler of the people”> because “of” is not on the same semantic level as “duke”. I will leave that to Matt and Rala, and will help as needed.
• Run text by Paul: I’m pretty sure the blank space thing is going to be all right, but I’m not comfortable enough with how XML interacts with other languages we’re using in the back end (notably PHP). So I’ll show it to Paul and ask him whether our mark-up is unnecessarily clunky in a glaring way. Anything that needs fixing won’t need re-encoding from scratch; we’ll find a way to automate as much of the transformation as possible, if it comes to that.
• Put the text online: …and debug until it works. :)
• Blog encoding principles: Matt and Rala will post here a completist account of their encoding principles, perhaps with a chart or table of all elements and attributes accompanied by the reasoning behind them. This will be the beginning of a document that will be publically linked from the main VHL site, and that will serve as a starting point for introducing other scholars to our work.
• Move on!: Then the real fun begins: I will perhaps do a first pass at indexes (*cough* with a little help from my friends…) while the Villani scholars annotate?

Comments? Additions? Subtractions?

Another blog about the state of the Villani project.
First of all, remember that the completed book 13 is on the server. If anyone has any comments or suggestions on our encoding we’d be overjoyed to hear them!
In particular, we would be interested in comments on our method of encoding persons–we decided to use the “person” category to embrace individual personages, peoples (fiorentini, etc), families (ubertini, etc), and officers (priori, etc). You might also note the “pb” category–this category embraces all manner of places (cities, regions, etc) and human constructions (palaces, bridges, etc).
In the meantime we’ve been looking back over our completed encoding of book 13 and thinking about the various textual categories to annotate.
I am mainly interested in the pedagogical uses of the text and so I have begun to annotate those categories which I think will be most useful for teaching–persons, to begin with, and then places/things.
Finally I wanted to let everyone know that the Center for Teaching Excellence at my university is sponsoring a series of talks on the use of technology in teaching. The organizer would like to have a panel on the VHL. Anyone interesting in participating?

We have reached a point in our biennial NEH grant period when we can make a general assessment of our progress and look carefully at upcoming challenges. I would like to publicly praise our project director for her tireless efforts in keeping all of us committed and getting things done. Thanks to Vika and Paul, great progress has been made in the overall design infrastructure of VHL. One of the major challenges we have encountered so far is the relative gap in the advancement of the various projects that compose VHL (Esposizioni, Conclusiones and Cronica). The encoding of Esposizioni is proceeding at good pace (thanks in particular to the excellent work done by Roberto, this semester, but also thanks to feedback from all members of the team, Mike in particular, and Guyda). The Pico Project is now ready to enter a new, exciting phase, that of active, collaborative annotation, involving some 25-30 scholars over three continents (our thanks to Francesco Borghesi for all his painstaking work of coordination, over the past few months). Pico and Esposizioni are more advanced than the Villani project, and a genuine effort will have to be made now for the latter to meet the goals we assigned ourselves for the second year of our grant. While the different stages of development of the various projects do not represent a problem per se, it is of the utmost importance that we try to bring them all to a level in which the common framework and interface provided by the VHL can be effectively exploited. This is particularly true for the Boccaccio–Dante-Villani component, as the possibility of cross-referencing these texts is greater and also depends on our encoding choices. First of all, it is crucial that the XML encoding schemes for both Esposizioni and Villani continue to be publicly discussed and tested, hoping for a feedback from the scholarly community at large. Documenting our encoding practice, as we go, is therefore essential. The blog is an excellent tool for this purpose. The more we blog about our work-in-progress, including our doubts, problems and difficult choices, the more feedback we can expect from our team members as well as scholars elsewhere. Moreover, we can now begin to at least think forward to further developments of VHL. As you remember, its two fundamental components are what we call the Editing House and the Seminar Room. Both together make up our Laboratory (or Workshop). Both share the same platform and a suite of tools to be developed as we go. Let’s think of these two components as both virtual meeting and working spaces and a set of scholarly and pedagogical practices. While the Editing House is taking shape, we should also begin to envision what the Seminar Room may be like. Searchable and interactively annotated editions of our texts provide also a platform for a number of learning activities. When we look at encoding, we should always keep this (its potential application in the “virtual classroom”) in mind. On the annotation side, the Pico Project may serve as a prototype. The experiment in collaborative annotation about to begin can also be a test for interfacing research and pedagogical activities: annotating can be conceived as an ongoing seminar in which participants learn from each other (the complexity of Pico’s text imposes more than allows this). I expect our weblog to be also a venue where methodological discussion about the annotation process and its procedures takes place. Next semester, the Decameron Web will also be “reactivated” for the course I’ll be teaching again for the first time in four years: I hope this will offer us another opportunity for a general updating of its content as well as for thinking about its potential improvement within the framework of VHL.

Oh rapture! Article in Inside Higher Ed reports that “Blackboard, Inc., said it would acquire its top competitor, WebCT, Inc., for $180 million.” The merger is supposed to take place in the next few months; the new conglomerate will “continue to support both companies’ products for the foreseeable future, to keep disruption to current clients to a minimum, the two companies said.”

Forgive me if I am not thrilled, though if you were reading this blog last year you’ll hardly be surprised. One of the commenters on the above-linked post pointed out that Blackboard is much more flexible than WebCT, and from that perspective the merger may be a good thing; but neither company seems interested in actually disseminating knowledge, as does for example MIT’s Open CourseWare. It’s also telling that all of the dozen or so comments so far on the Inside Higher Ed article reflect a negative attitude toward the news. Some academics are worried about whether the merger signals a monopoly in the works; others are getting the word out about open-source alternatives.

Since many universities, Brown among them, seem enamored of the suboptimal options offered by WebCT, there’s seemingly nothing to be done on an institutional level. On a smaller scale, however, we can work toward better solutions. This requires humanist academics to either learn more about educational software and web design or employ people who are already good at it, or both. Since that learning curve is inevitable these days anyway (just try being full-time faculty and not knowing how to attach a document to an email), all that remains is to not give in to the apparent convenience of commercial course management software and think more broadly. Wouldn’t it be great if, in a few years, people still learned new things from the materials you created for a course you no longer teach?

Monday 17th, edited to add: A follow-up article in Inside Higher Ed asks, “In buying WebCT, did course-management giant vanquish competition, or is open source the real competition?”

Thank you Mike for the encouraging words. I wish to signal two more changes to be done in the first chunk of the esposizioni to make it consistent with the second chunk (the part I am currently working on):
- Encode “Figliuolo” (usually capitalized) when it is referred to Jesus Christ: nameref=”figlioulo” reg=”gesucristo”. I think “Figliuolo” has not been encoded at all in the first chunk.
- “Etiocle”: the most used modern Italian version for the name of this character (the brother of Polinice) is “Eteocle”. Thus we must change all the “Etiocle”s in the first chunk into “Eteocle”s.
Roberto Bacci

Technical problems all fixed…now I can blog!

A quick update on the Villani Project lest anyone presume that it has fallen into oblivion. As of the middle of last week Rala and I posted our complete encoding of Book 13 of Villani’s Cronica to the server.

When we began this project we encoded a handful of themes and a little bit of information about persons named in the Cronica. Over the course of the year we simultaneously narrowed and simplified our method of encoding themes, broadened our treatment of persons, and encoded new information about textual objects (places, buildings, offices, peoples, family names) and textual structure (citations of various sorts, Villani’s “moralizing” interventions in the narrative, etc).
Undoubtedly we will be “tweaking” our encoding and, in time, adding still new categories so we would really appreciate any comments participants might have on the encoding as it stands now–especially on the encoding of “themes”.

Now the bulk of our effort shifts to the annotation and, to a lesser extent, the translation of the text. Rala and I will be “tele-meeting” this week to divide up the annotation work.

That’s all for now!

I am encoding the second chunk of the Esposizioni. When the two chunks will be put together, we must remember to do the following:
- in the first chunk, change “Orco” from “place” to “mythentity” as it can mean both “inferno” and “Plutone”.
- make sure that all the terms for “angelo” “arcangelo” “demone” and their variations (”angiolo” etc.) - so, basically, all the terms for “devil” and angel”, also in the SINGULAR - are encoded in the first chunk. I have been consistent in encoding them in the second chunk, but now I have realized I might not have encoded all the occurrences in the first chunk. Terms like that, generic and singular, are more important in the second chunk than in the first. That is why I have decided to encode them, but we must check the consistency in the first chunk.
- All the “Oceano” occurrences must be checked with attention. Myth-entity or place? It seems to depend on the context. Furthermore, there are many “Oceano”s: Oceano orientale, atlantico, etiopico etc.
- Both pagan divinities (”Venere”, “Giove” etc.) and Christian saints (”Santa Lucia” etc) can be also temples and churches, thus not only “persons” (mythical or not) but also “places”.
- I agree with Mike on the names of the planets: they should not be considered as possible destinations, even though A. Warburg wrote an essay on this topic, and the idea of “astronaut” was not unknown in tha Middle Ages (most of Warburg’s examples are from the early Renaissance, but with medieval antecedents).
- In the second chunk, the whole part dealing with “Plutone” is particularly messy and unclear (for example: there are many references to what I have labeled as “mythentities”, Sicilian mountains that are also Greek gods etc.) Thus, when the time comes, please read it and double check my encoding with particular attention.
Ok, I think it is all for now.
Roberto Bacci

I’d like to draw the attention of our international viewers to a forthcoming conference in memory of Vittore Branca, to be held at the Warburg Institute in London on October 21-22 2005. The conference programme is here; speakers on Boccaccio include Zyg Baranski, Carlo Caruso, Nicola Jones, Catherine Reynolds, Rhiannon Daniels, Jon Usher, Martin McLaughlin and (ahem) me. Beyond Boccaccio, there are also papers on Settecento and Ottocento, Humanism and Renaissance, the modern period, and Venice. Admission is free.

I believe, like Pertusi (Leonzio Pilato tra Petrarca e Boccaccio, 109), that Boccaccio got most all of IV.lit.110 from the Chronicon of Eusebius. On p. 66a of Helm’s ed of the Chronicon, the name that Boccaccio cites as Aristotene (Aristothenes) actually corresponds to Eratosthenes. Boccaccio makes a mistake of transcription here. On line 17, the affirmation that Homer flourished a hundred years after the fall of Troy is attributed to Eratosthenes (a word whose only variants, Helm records, are “Eratostenes” and “Erathosthenes.”). Padoan, in fact, reaches a similar conclusion in his notes. How should we encode this?