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.