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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yesterday, Massimo and I met with Paul to talk about where our various projects stand and where we go from here. The following are some highlights of that exciting hour and a half, full of cautious optimism and web browsing, as well as a general recap of the project so far..
The VHL interface is currently located here, on STG’s development server. It is very much a work in progress, and some features may not work at any given moment. But it’s coming along!
Part of Boccaccio’s Esposizioni sopra la Comedia is already online, and the rest is currently being encoded. The current plan is to have the entire text up online by the end of the current semester. The text can be viewed by exposition (example). We are looking for alpha testers of the annotation system! If you are a scholar with relevant expertise and would like to get an account, please email me (vhl-at-wordsend-org) There is no quantity commitment; however, at this point we’re looking for people who can both annotate the text and give us constructive feedback: what is good, what needs work (and what kind of work), what features would be desirable. The content of the annotations is up to the participant scholars. Current project participants: if you can think of possible interested parties, please email me as well.
We also have indexes, notably of people and places in the Esposizioni. If you would like to help us verify the entries, please help yourself! Instructions are on the above-linked pages.
Pico’s Conclusiones Nongentae, also known as the 900 Theses, is coming along. A group of scholars is ready to start annotating it as well. In order to render it more easily cross-referenced with other texts, Paul will merge the Pico database with the VHL database (which contains the Esposizioni annotations). This will not affect the user’s experience.
Massimo showed us a Latin lemmatizer called LemLat, the standalone software version of which looks potentially useful for the Pico text(s). We’re looking into it.
Paul told us about PhiloLogic, a search engine that STG has been studying. It is a powerful piece of software, which copies texts into its electronic brain and does its own thing with them, but allows you to modify the interface to fit into your project. We can potentially ask it to search annotations, if they are located within a file (as opposed to database). Paul is looking into its redundancy with MySQL; if it has unique features that we like, it may be our search engine soon.
The search engine is the largest overall VHL task for the year, technically speaking. What would you, o Researcher, like to be able to search for in our texts? Aside, that is, from simple string searches and already-developed things like word collocations?
One wish list item, which perhaps we’ll get to before the end of the grant, is a comparative Boccaccio/Villani glossary. This would be in addition to a glossary of terms that Boccaccio defines in the Esposizioni.
That’s about it, for the moment. Massimo, Paul: have I missed something?
Last Friday Massimo, Rala, Matt and I met to talk about the Villani project. Here are a couple of notes from that meeting:
1. The encoding is well under way, and Matt and Rala think they can finish it (complete with corrections) by the end of this month. They agreed to email me once they’re done with the first pass of encoding and corrections, hopefully sometime this week, so that we can go over them together and tweak as needed.
2. Annotation: when we do get to it, Rala and Matt expressed interest in encoding people, places and historical events. Naturally, we won’t limit the Villani annotation to these three topics, but they’re quite large enough to keep our consultants and any annotators busy for a while!
3. Matt and Rala will come up with a list of potential annotators whom we might contact. If anyone else has a potential lead for involvement, by all means, comment here or email me (vika-wordsend-org).
4. We’re thinking of conferences that might be useful for presentations and feedback. Anyone have ideas for conferences or other meetings as regards this project specifically, as opposed to the larger VHL? (Kalamazoo/Leeds are two obvious choices, but it never hurts to have more venues.)
5. The question of cross-referencing Villani with other online projects (such as Pico, Catasto and Tratte) remains open and subject to our having time and resources for it.
As heartened as I am by the increased use of the blog this year, it would be most excellent if we could keep discussion of index entries confined to the forum. This will make it easy to see at a glance whether there’s been some discussion already about a given entry.
Registration for the forum is free and fast, and there are plenty of instructions there; moreover, it is open to all – so whether or not you’re a poster on this blog, you are invited to get an account and start discussions on the forum.
I am pleased to announce that there is now stuff to play with.
A part of the Esposizioni, the part that has been most thoroughly encoded so far, has been put up. From this rather large chunk (I’m guessing roughly 175 modern print pages), we have built an index of people’s names. Now, this index must be verified, and we need your enthusiastic help.
Not many people besides the project’s participants read this blog, so on Monday I’ll compose an email to be sent out (with modifications as you see fit) to various pertinent mailing lists. I’ll be happy to send it out to Humanist and Digital Medievalist lists. Anyone else willing to forward it along to colleagues or lists? If so, would you please let me/us know which lists you’re going to cover?
The project’s current status is critically important for a smooth interaction with it. For the moment, most of VHL’s stuff (everything except for this weblog and a discussion forum, about which below) currently lives on the development server of the Scholarly Technology Group here at Brown. It is very much a work in progress. At any time, it may simply not work, or work in unexpected ways. If you’re really lucky (?), you could happen upon a moment when one of us is working on the site, and the same page loaded twice a minute apart could well be completely different the second time around!
Believe it or not, however, this isn’t the most exciting part. The exciting part is this (n.b.: don’t use Internet Explorer to look at these):
Please note: the annotation engine, built by Paul Caton, is not quite ready for use yet, and we will not be using it for verifying the index. When it’s ready, we would like for the annotators with sufficient access privileges to focus on their individual research, or that done with a small group of people on a specific issue. It would be beneficial for projects being researched by a larger group to be discussed on the forum, so as to alert the public and perhaps increase the level of interest and participation.
Thoughts?
Okay, so it’s well into the new semester. But, although things have been slow here on the weblog, they’ve been moving at a pretty exciting speed here at VHL HQ.
In a nutshell:
Aside from writing the papers I’ll be presenting in March, June and July, as well as checking in on the progress of various project components, I’ll be concentrating on getting the texts to play nicely with the code. Having just spent several hours cleaning up the Esposizioni chunk a bit (nothing major, just structural well-formedness), I’m excited to get my hands on actual code again. It’s so… logical. XML is a great toy, and tool.
Guyda and I have been asked for a few screenshots of the annotation engine, for the Digital Medievalist article; I’ll post them here when I make them.
My colleagues can update the world about their own work in more detail. Undoubtedly I’m missing something(s). Feel free to supplement this short report, o Team.
The spammers appear to be getting right through the multiple blocks I’ve set up. They’re getting good. As a result, I’m setting the highest level of moderation on: all comments must be approved by the administrator (me).
There’s another way to do this: there exists a plugin that will ask the commenter to look at a random image and type in the letters and numbers appearing in that image. Bots can’t generally read images (if you know of one that can, that’s one hell of an image-recognition software!), so this is more or less a failsafe. It does create an extra step for every comment, but seems to work well for some people.
Uh, comments?
Edit: Okay, this is a bad idea accessibility-wise. It is unlikely but quite possible that blind people will be reading this blog using text-to-voice software. The image option would render them unable to comment. So for the moment, I’ll moderate comments.
We’ve gotten comment-spammed, big time. I’ve now installed a plug-in that should take care of that. Now, after I erase all those vicious comments, we’ll be back to your regularly scheduled mostly quiet programming.
If you are subscribed to this blog’s syndication feed and just got three test posts, my apologies. The tests were for a new feature: those who do not use syndication feeds can now sign up for notification every time a new post is made to VHL. To sign up, enter an email address into the form on the right, in the links column. A confirmation email will be sent to that email address, and once you confirm, you’re all set.
This system will not email you every time a comment is posted. However, if you yourself post a comment, you can still check the box to be notified if anyone else comments on the same post.
I would like to introduce myself. My name is Rala Diakite, and as you have seen, I am working on the Villani portion of the VHL. My stint as a research fellow for the Decameron Web in the year 2000 was my first experience of this dynamic project. That period found me at Brown University, as a doctoral candidate in Italian Studies. I have since completed my degree (2003), with a dissertation that compares the political vision of Giovanni Villani to that of Dante, as well as exploring Villani’s role as an early reader of Dante. My interests are Villani, of course, as well as the genre of the Italian chronicle generally. I am intrigued by the contemporaneous blossoming of the vernacular chronicle and the novella in this period, and by their areas of intersection. As Assistant Professor in the Humanities Department of Fitchburg State College, I teach courses on Italian language and culture.
As Vika mentioned, we’ve just submitted an article on the Esposizioni project, so most of my attention has been focused on that of late. I’ve been doing some general background on the commentary tradition, and thinking about the peculiarities of this text as an oral commentary, in comparison with the more usual written ones. Since my main area of responsibility on the project is the literary references, I’ve also been thinking about how they should be encoded. I’ve already come across some tricky questions, such as how to show references to multiple authored works such as the Bible. I have also been wondering how to represent those instances when Boccaccio uses Dante as an authority, citing further passages in the Commedia to illustrate his reading of the first 17 cantos of the Inferno. Should these just be treated like the citations of other authors, or could we do more?
One of my long-term projects is the compilation of an über-bibliography of Boccaccio’s works in English translation, and I’ve just discovered an English translation of part of the Esposizioni (Esp., X, 52-66) which I can include. The passage was translated by Maggie Günsberg, and appears in Michael Caesar, ed., Dante: The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 169-71. I only know of one other English translation of part of the Esposizioni, the Accessus, which appears in Alistair J. Minnis, Medieval literary theory and criticism c.1100-c.1375 : The commentary tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 503-19 (translated by David Wallace). Cristiana, Mike and I are working towards a new English translation of the Esposizioni, but until that appears, as far as I can tell, this is all there is! (If anyone come across any extracts from Boccaccio in English translation, especially in anthologies, then do please let me know.)
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).
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).
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.