Dear Readers,

I would like to invite you to an upcoming presentation

When: Wednesday, May 3rd, 2 pm

What: “History in the Digital Age: Medieval Chronicler Giovanni Villani Meets the Internet”

Who: Rala Diakite, Matt Sneider and Vika Zafrin

Where: Fitchburg State College, 160 Pearl St. Fitchburg MA / Miller Oval (in Miller Hall)

This talk will provide a quick overview of recent developments in the way historical sources are being presented for use by researchers and students via the internet. This as a preface to a guided tour of the Virtual Humanities Lab, and particularly of the segment dedicated to Giovanni Villani’s Cronica, a fourteenth-century Florentine chronicle. We will explain our encoding strategies and present our work thus far, as well as demonstrating some of the available and soon-to-be available tools on the site. We will conclude with a discussion of the pedagogical potential of our digitized Villani text.

Hope to see you there!

For further information, please contact Rala Diakite at 978-665-4706 or rdiakite@fsc.edu

Upon thinking further about the search functions for the Villani text, I was wondering/hoping that our encoding would allow us to make searches that involve those encoded elements. Simple string searches may currently be done on the OVI database, where Villani’s Nuova Cronica also resides. Will we be able to search for occurrences of Person/gender/female within the same paragraph with the word “Francia”, or examples of Person / position / priore in close proximity to Theme / econ? Will this open up a world of complexity that will cause the program to crash, or is this exactly what we are aiming for?

As we look more closely at the Villani encoding, we are looking to clean up and simplify as much as possible. Some series of attributes are naturally infinite, such as the names of persons or names of places. On the other hand, we have one set of attributes “natura”, under type=”forza”, under the element “theme”. They are as follows:

Giustizia, forca, Condanna, Multa confinamento, Prigione, Guerra, Guerra esilio, ribellione, attacco, Assalto, Confiscazione, Mutilazione, Incendio, Assassinio, presa citta, Guerra presa citta, Congiuro, Arresto tortura, Assissinio mutilamento, Assassinio, Mutilamento cannabalismo, Esilio, Guerra presacastello, Assassinio, Blocco, Guerra, Assedio, Ostaggio, Assedio, Ribellione Guerra, Condanna esilio, Scomunica, Tortura forca, Mutilamento, Confinamento, Furto, Tortura multa, ribellione, Guerra cattura, Presacitta, Presacastello, Giustizia, Confina, Forca cattura, forca condanna

Would it be helpful or not helpful to combine these into groupings? Groupings like punizione civile, punizione ecclesiastico, guerra, for example. Would that add unneccesary complexity? Or would it be best to leave these forms of force in their original wordings as we did with the person: “name” attributes, and give up trying to classify them.

I imagine a sort of grim catalogue of violence, and index of evils that could be drawn from this encoding. Villani has his spicy side too. Any suggestions welcome.

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

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”

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?

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.

Buon giorno bloggatori!

We have divided our overall work into three parts:

• the encoding and the annotation of a single large section of Villani’s “Cronica”,
• the creation of a series of thematic “showcases” which collect annotated excerpts from the “Cronica” which would be useful to both students and scholars (possible themes include natural disasters, omens and portents, the florentine economy, Villani’s use of evidence, foreign lands, etc.),
• the English translation of the above.

For now we will be focusing on the first of these three parts. We’ve finally learned how to use XML and we are beginning to work on the encoding. We’ve decided to begin our work on the final book (book 13 in some editions and 12 in others).

In our discussions with each other and with Vika we decided to focus our initial attention on three areas of encoding. The first area involves the textual and temporal breaks—book, chapters, rubrics and dates—whose encoding will help us learn the ropes. The second area is thematic. The final book of Villani—especially the initial chapters—is much involved with the phenomenon of the “signore”. We are planning to encode in such a way as to bring into relief Villani’s preoccupation with this phenomenon. Ideally users should be able to search for passages treating “tyrannical” government—its rise, its installation, its actions, its judgment by the Florentine Villani.

We’ll then move to persons in Villani’s text. Here the attributes should be few initially—we’ll add more as we proceed. Of course choosing these attributes is painful…it seems to involve a tremendous amount of highly problematic simplification. I would welcome any comments. We might characterize people:

• as “real” or “mythical” in the manner of Roberto’s encoding;
• by their place or origin, their dwelling place or their citizenship;
• by the vision Villani has of their social status (if this is relatively clear);
• by the political role they fill at any given moment in the text (”official” roles like the priorate or “unofficial” roles like that of a faction leader).

We should mention that we were lucky enough to win a berth at the Kalamazoo conference in a special session on “Text and Image in Digital Scholarship” to present our component of the project.

-Matt and Rala

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.