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The VHL @ Brown University
The Virtual Humanities Lab at Brown University (VHL) is one of 23 “models of excellence” in Humanities Education, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities for 2004-06 ($178,000 in outright funds). The VHL builds on the work done in the
Department of Italian Studies, in collaboration with the Scholarly Technology Group and scholars elsewhere. Because of its pioneering history in humanities computing, its open curriculum, and its dual identity as a university-college where teaching and research are intimately intertwined, Brown is an ideal venue for such an experiment, able to act as a useful testing ground for a wide range of institutions, from small community colleges to leading research universities.
In its current format, the VHL provides a platform for the development of a mini-corpus of model-texts: Giovanni Villani, Nuova Cronica; Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron and Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante; and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Conclusiones Nongentae Disputandae.
These specific sources were chosen not only because they are the object of ongoing research, (e.g. dissertations, translations or editions) by core and external collaborators: they were also selected because in their diverse typology - historical chronicle, narrative text, literary commentary, philosophical treatise - they pose specific descriptive and interpretive challenges to editors, annotators and encoders.
The VHL environment is conceived as both an editing house and a seminar room. The two primary functions being integrated into VHL are: collaborative and interactive annotation and semantic encoding and indexing.
Participants and Collaborators
(in alphabetical order)
- Guyda Armstrong, Lecturer in Italian, Cardiff University
- Roberto Bacci, Research Assistant, Brown University
- Francesco Borghesi, Assistant Professor of Italian, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
- Dino Buzzetti, Associate Professor of Medieval Philosophy, University of Bologna
- Paul Caton, Research Analyst, Scholarly Technology Group, Brown University
- Rala Diakite, Assistant Professor of Italian Studies, Fitchburg College
- Cristiana Fordyce, Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian, College of the Holy Cross
- Elli Mylonas, Associate Director CIS and STG, Brown University
- Michael Papio, Assistant Professor of French and Italian, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
- Massimo Riva, Professor of Italian Studies and Modern Culture and Media, Brown University
- Matthew Sneider, Assistant Professor of History, University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth
- Vika Zafrin, Project Director, NEH/Brown University