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

I’ve been working on Boccaccio’s citations of other literary sources in the Esposizioni, and was wondering how we were going to incorporate them into the online text. How about if I add the references to sources in as annotations to the section of the text that we have up now (Esp., Acc., I-IV)? I thought I would simply add the references as they appear in Padoan’s notes to the Mondadori edition (Milan, 1965), and then others more erudite can come after me and make further comments or corrections. Or would it be better to wait and encode them instead?

If anyone has any ideas about what to do for “Campi Ciri” or the “Rostri Aguglia,” I’d be very grateful to know about it! All bibliographical suggestions welcome.

For those interested in doing some “scalpitio capitis,” here are some little puzzles related to encoding:

1. FALACRO. It seems no one has any idea who this is. While this is not a problem in itself (cf. Leontonio), it could come back later to haunt us if we decide to give a special weight to attributes because (in my opinion) there is some confusion here on B’s part. Falacer is a god (perh. Etruscan) and so implicitly poses the problem of what to do with gods. See point 2.
2. VENERE PONTINA and GIOVE INDIGETE. We’ve encoded these two personalities of the major deities separately. Is that a good idea? In fact, have we decided what to do with the Christian God? He has so many personalities in the Esp. and is cited so often that this could be more trouble than it’s worth.
3. FRANCONE and MARCOMANNO. This one is of a less theoretical nature. Boccaccio cites them as if they were individuals, but in reality this may be due to a misreading (with all due respect). Marcomannus and francus were just two adjectives used to describe Germanic tribes. I’m bringing this up simply because we’ve decided to make a distinction between individual and collective names.

Any ideas on this would be much appreciated.

M

I’ve gone through the index nominum for cantos I-IV and have some observations that, I hope, are helpful.

Some typos to correct in the encoding:

Agrippina Maggiore is really Agrippina Minore;
Alcipiade should be Alcibiade;
Gaio Antonio should be added;
Antonio, Marco duplicates Marco Antonio;
Aristotene should be added;
Arunte should be Arruns;
Asclepiade the philosopher should be added;
Benedetto is the same as Boniface VIII;
Capi should be Capis;
Dionisio the Younger should be added;
Diotima should be Diutima;
Eune should be Eune Maura;
Since we have other personifications (e.g. Onore), we should add Filosofia;
Galeno, Claudio should be just Galieno;
We should add “san” to Gregorio, just for the sake of consistency;
Iaso should be Iasio;
Igino should be Iginio;
We should add the collective Inglesi;
Lucia and Lucia, santa should be merged;
Anco, Marcio should be changed to Marcio, Anco;
Marco Annenio should be merged with Seneca;
The Minturnesi are collective;
The first Nerone is the same as Domizio, Gneo;
Poppeia should be Poppeia Sabina;
The two entries for Proculo should be merged;
Roboam should be added;
Sciti should be Scizi;
The three entries for Silvio could be clarified by making them: Silvio, Enea; Silvio, Postumo Giulio; Silvio, Latinus.
Simone should be Simone Mago;
Tolomeo Feludense is the same as Tolomeo, Claudio.

Of course, if anyone notices a problem with any of this, please let me know. I’ve put together a list of the English equivalents and will send them shortly to Vika. There are, however, some more problems of a different nature that I’ll bring up in another post.

M

Find it here. Please feel free to start working on it, per instructions contained on the page linked above as well as in the appropriate forum.

Pipe dream: automatically put an asterisk (or something) by an index entry, if there is a topic for that index entry on the discussion forum.

I’ll try to figure this out later on; or if someone else wants to, well, great. :)

A little context (if this is rehash for you, apologies): right now, we have an index of people’s names. I’m working on what I think is the next largest index, that of places. The way they work is twofold: we have the index page and, for each name we have a page of search results, displaying all the paragraphs in which said name appears, with the name itself in red.

Two (edit: three) questions have arisen with regard to the places index.

1. Some places that Boccaccio refers to are named something else now, something entirely different (for example, the former Trojan colony in Sicily that they called Acesta is now apparently called Calatafimi). How do we deal with that? The options, as I see them, are:

• Make Boccaccio’s name the primary index entry, and create another entry – unlinked to any page of search results – that says “see Acesta.”
• Make Boccaccio’s name the primary index entry and put an annotation into the text itself, noting the present-day name of the place. The drawback to this is that, if the place is mentioned several times, the annotator would have to first search for all its occurrences, and then link the annotation to all the relevant paragraphs. Might prove cumbersome, but also perhaps useful for the reader’s context.
• Index only the modern spellings of the place names, and Boccaccio’s spellings will show up in the search results page that lists all the paragraphs where a particular name occurs. Drawback is, if someone reads a place name in the text and wants to use the index to find its other occurrences, there’s no way to do that.
  • Unless! we make all the encoded names within the text not only colored, but also links to the same search results page where you arrive if you click on a name in the index. Which may be a good idea in any case: again, if a reader wants to see where a particular name occurs, they could do it straight from the text without going to the index, if they prefer.

My instinct is to go with the first option, possibly keeping in mind option 3.5. Anyone have opinions?

2. There are several seas mentioned. Sometimes they are called “mar[e] YYY” and sometimes just “il/l’YYY.” Do they get indexed under M (mare Egeo), or under their names (Egeo, mare or just Egeo)?

2a. My pipe dream in this regard is to eventually have indicators for every place name of what kind of place it is. But perhaps that’s for later.

3. Inferno/hell has several different names, including for example Baratro and Tartaro. Should we have all of the “variants” refer to the main entry inferno?

There’ll surely be other questions, but these are the most immediate. Thoughts?

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):

• The Esposizioni table of contents; click on a chapter to see it. Note, when viewing the text, that some terms are highlighted: proper names in blue, themes that we have begun to encode in pink, and words or phrases that Boccaccio regards as terms, and defines, in green. Hovering over a highlighted segment of text reveals more information about it. (For now, this information is in rudimentary form. We’ll be working on that.)
• Indexes -> Esposizioni: People. The only index we have finished thus far. If you are interested in contributing verifications, additions or corrections for the entries in that index, we would welcome your contribution. You can click on any one of them to see a page of paragraphs in which a given entry appears. There are instructions on the main index page as well as on the index entry matches page; they explain how to contribute using the
• discussion forum. Regardless of whether you participate in work on the Index, if you would like to discuss other ideas about the Esposizioni or the way our project is working out so far, please let us know by starting a discussion!

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?

As some of you know, I’ve been working (with Paul’s invaluable help) on putting up the chunk of the Esposizioni that we’ve more or less completely encoded. This amounts to the Accessus, Canti I-III and most of Canto IV. Though this might not seem like much, let me assure you, it’s quite a bit of text, and the rest of the text is well on its way to being encoded as well. We probably won’t complete the encoding process until next fall, when Roberto may be able to join us again.

So. In order to put up the text in a useful way, that is, with at least some bells and whistles instead of what would look like plain text, we need to index it. Among other things, this means regularizing proper names. Those of you who did this with the Decameron will be feeling a slight chill and numbness as you read this; I’m thinking we need a better way of doing it.

Right now, I’m working on the index of people. This amounts to over 500 entries at last count. In order to make the index we need regularized names, a task that is complicated by the fact that sometimes Boccaccio refers to the wrong person, or refers to the right person but gives the wrong details about them, which makes their identity rather difficult to verify.

I’m far from an expert in historical work, but I’m working on coming up with regularized names for every entry, even if they are wrong. I’m doing this for several reasons. One is practical: I’ll soon be going away for a month and would like to put the thing up so that people can play with it. Another reason, though, is that this indexing business seems like a great opportunity to test out this online-collaboration thing we’ve been talking about. Here’s a detailed description of how this could work; it may sound definite, but I’m looking to y’all for opinions, suggestions and warnings of possible crash-and-burn.

We’ll have an index of names, coded in some way to distinguish between the names we’re pretty sure about (probably easiest would be with color – regular black for the ones we don’t need checked out, red for the ones we’re seeking help on). Each name will be a link to a page that will show you the context(s) for that name. From what I’ve seen so far, it would probably be enough to have the paragraph in which the name appears as well as the two paragraphs immediately preceding and following it.

I’ll set up a discussion forum, to which anyone will be able to post. We will advertise this everywhere we can: Kalamazoo, medievalist and Italianist and perhaps even history and comp. lit. mailing lists, individual emails to your friends who you think might be interested. Hopefully, there will be enough interest that people will post information about specific names on the forum, telling us the regularizations of these names, which of a set of people Boccaccio is likely to be talking about, and the source for this information.

The VHL team members will be the only ones who will change any of the information in the index itself. We’ll set up some sort of a checks-and-balances process, as appropriate.

The index will have only the names themselves (and any variants). Any additional information about the names will be put in as annotations to the text itself. If the annotation content has been research by someone who doesn’t have a participant-user account, we either make them a user (perhaps after a certain amount of input on their part, and with context-appropriate privileges) or one of us will post the annotation crediting the original author of the research and linking to their forum post.

How does this sound? What am I missing? Would you use such a system?