Conference Report: Isidore of Seville: Transforming Knowledge from Scriptorium to Cyberspace (original) (raw)
Information Technologies for Medieval Studies: Some Recent Experiences in Italy
Reti Medievali Rivista, 20/1, 2019
[En] The article highlights the relations between Italian medieval studies and digital humanities, starting from researches conducted on Vatican documents and other ecclesiastical sources since the 1980s; then it goes on to discuss some more recent projects, based on various types of sources. A multi-faceted debate emerges, in which the experiences of historians and editors of medieval sources are intertwined with those of archivists and librarians, to face the incessant transformation of Information Technology, from the first “Read-Only” Web to the Web 2.0, from the Semantic Web to the challenges posed to historians by research data and Linked Open Data technologies. [IT] L’articolo ricostruisce i rapporti degli studi medievistici italiani con le digital humanities, muovendo dalle ricerche condotte sulla documentazione vaticana e su altre fonti ecclesiastiche a partire dagli anni Ottanta del secolo scorso, per passare poi a discutere di alcuni progetti più recenti, basati su diverse tipologie di fonti. Emerge un dibattito a più voci, in cui le esperienze degli storici e degli editori di fonti medievali si intrecciano a quelle maturate nel mondo degli archivi e delle biblioteche, per affrontare le incessanti trasformazioni della Information Technology, dai primi siti in rete al Web 2.0, dal Web semantico alle recenti sfide lanciate agli storici dai dati della ricerca e dalle tecnologie dei Linked Open Data.
God's Librarian: Isidore of Seville and His Literary Agenda
A Companion to Isidore of Seville, 2020
Here I offer a series of impressionistic semblanzas of what I understand to be the essential elements of Isidore of Seville's context, personality, and literary agenda. When viewed through the lens of the Visigothic slate texts and their evidence for a continuous history of Latin literacy in the Iberian Peninsula, he comes newly into focus as operating still very much in a late Roman world. If we read his letters with care, we recognise too that Isidore was altogether less worldly than we have made him out to be; his priorities lay elsewhere, his thought and energy were spent in constant revision of both ancient knowledge and Patristic exegesis, memorialised in the complex transmission of his opera. And by attending in particular to his prefaces to those works, we perceive an anxious determination to render the universal manageable – and on his own terms.
2008
Contemporary society has become an information society and hence it makes sense to interpret various changes in the cultural sphere. Connections between computer technology and literature are one aspect of the complicated global set of problems in tackling the adaptation of texts with the media. The article focuses on what happens with literary texts in cyberspace, how they adapt to that environment, and it examines the forms of “cyberliterature”. The most comprehensive definition of cyberliterature derives from the concept of digital literature, i.e. literature created on the computer and presented by means of the computer. Trying to narrow the concept of cyberliterature, it can be characterised by certain computer-specific qualities: multi-linearity, different parts of hypertexts connected by links, uniting the written text with multimedia, interactivity etc. The second part of the article analyses a specific sub-category, one of the most intriguing border areas of cyberliterature...
PhiloBiblon, Information Technology, and Medieval Spanish Literature: A Balance Sheet
Humanitats a la xarxa: Món medieval. Humanities on the Web: The Medieval World, 2014
This paper brings up to date my “Desiderata para el estudio de las literaturas hispánicas medievales,” in Medioevo y literatura. Actas del V Congreso de la Asociación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval (Granada, 27 septiembre – 1 octubre 1993), ed. by Juan Paredes, 4 vols. (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1995, I, pp. 93-107. It begins with a succinct history of the development of PhiloBiblon from its origins at the University of Wisconsin as the Bibliography of Old Spanish Texts (BOOST) in 1975 to its current implementation as an online multilingual database (Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, Galician). In the future PhiloBiblon will be enriched, most importantly, through first-hand inspection of primary sources and by making use of the increasing number of secondary and tertiary sources now available on line. This leads to a consideration of the current state of information technology and medieval studies. The internet has revolutionized the way most scholars conduct research but it has not yet led to any significant change in he distribution of scholarship: the printed book is still coin of the realm, especially in Spain, where digital scholarship simply does not count in the evaluation of méritos. The paper then reviews the kinds of information resources currently available on the web, e.g., union catalogs of printed books and manuscripts, digital libraries of texts and facsimiles, generally from a given institution. There are as yet few examples of archives of both digital image and text. The last part reviews the desiderata mentioned in my 1992 paper, most of which are still wanting: repertories of dated and datable texts and manuscripts; codicological and paleographic databases for the study of paper, watermarks, ink, pigments, hands; tools for image analysis; repertories of the inventories of medieval libraries, prosopographical repertories, tools for and examples of digital editions. The primary need, however, for any web-based resource, is a secure home that will take responsibility for its maintenance and allow for continuous incremental improvement.
The English Historical Review, 2018
Scholarship on the Iberian Peninsula in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages is burgeoning across a variety of disciplines and time periods, yet the publication profile of the field remains disjointed. 'Late Antique and Early Medieval Iberia' (LAEMI) provides a publication hub for high-quality research on Iberian Studies from the fields of history, archaeology, theology and religious studies, numismatics, palaeography, music, and cognate disciplines. Another key aim of the series is to break down barriers between the excellent scholarship that takes place in Iberia and Latin America and the Anglophone worlds.
Romanic Review, 112/1 (The Pleasure of Dante’s Text / Il piacere del testo dantesco, H. Wayne Storey, Guest Editor), pp. 138-157., 2021
With digital repositories and databases available since the 1990s, Dante scholarship has always been at the forefront of the digital humanities and the digitization of medieval texts and manuscripts. However, the amount of information available about such aspects is imposing, and its location subject to the extreme dispersion of traditional scholarly publications: commentaries first but also academic journals, miscellanies, and so forth. Rather than being based on traditional word searches, a true advancement of knowledge needs to overcome the rigidity of text-based queries (and in-line markup embedded in text). Such paramount evolution is now made possible by the Semantic Web, an extension of the current web by description standards that help machines to understand and connect the information already available on the web. To achieve this, the latter is mapped using formal description and classification patterns, called ontologies. Ontologies are a key factor in managing meaningful search/data extraction, publishing relevant results on the web, search existing web resources, and offering answers to more sophisticated queries. Due to its vastness and complexity, Dante scholarship has calls for an ontology-based mapping, and specific tools have been designed to express the most difficult and articulate aspects of Dante's literary production, such as its use of biblical, classical, and medieval sources. This paper aims to introduce the aims and scope of a new digital library of Dante commentaries, built according to the aforementioned standards and aiming to refine and extend the ontologies developed for Dante's minor works to the more complex world of the Commedia.