Virtual Humanities Lab

Blog is closed. But we keep working!

admin — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 20:46:12 +0000

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.

Lyman Award: Willard McCarty, NYC, next Wednesday

vika — Tue, 09 May 2006 20:55:07 +0000

Next Wednesday the 17th I’ll be in New York, to attend the presentation of the Richard Lyman Award to one of my favorite computing humanists, Willard McCarty. If you are interested in humanities computing, work in it, and/or know Willard, come show your support and appreciation, not to mention meet interesting people:

3-5pm Lyman Award recipients lead a discussion of the American Council of Learned Societies’ Report on Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities and Social Sciences
5-6pm Presentation of the Award to Willard McCarty, Reader in Humanities Computing, Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London
6-7pm Reception in the Library’s Margaret Liebman Berger Forum

If you’d like to attend, please call Martha at 919.549.0661 ext. 156 to get put on the guest list. (It’s free to attend, but they’d like to know how many people are coming, and if you tell them you’re working on something related, they might be able to introduce you to like-minded souls.) And let me know you’ll be there, perhaps we can meet up!

May 3rd 2006 - Presentation on VHL and Villani

rala — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 02:57:01 +0000

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

Call for Participation

vika — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 20:05:08 +0000

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

Going public

vika — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 19:59:13 +0000

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.

Virtual Seminar Room

Massimo — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 13:30:13 +0000

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.

VHL presentation in Hamburg

Massimo — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 22:54:29 +0000

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.

Villani: What do we want to search?

rala — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 05:48:29 +0000

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?

Forza! in all its forms…

rala — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 05:43:35 +0000

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.

Esposizioni citations

guyda — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 14:36:44 +0000

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?