Digital Humanities Talk 2022

From Renaissance Letters to Digital Communities: Research Projects and Methods in Digital Humanities

Dr. Isabella Magni and doctoral candidate Paolo Scartoni will be visiting Stony Brook University to give a talk and participate in a conversation organized by Prof. Paul Firbas in the context of his SPN 415/510 course on Mestizo Studies. This event will be in-person on April 7th (2022) from 4.45 to 6.00 pm in Melville Library E-4340 (forth floor) and is sponsored by the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures, the Center for Italian Studies and the Univertsity Libraries Center for Digital Humanities.

The talk and conversation will provide an introduction to actual textual problems and work-in progress projects in digital humanities. The event is structured around a sent of basic questions, such as:

What are the digital humanities? How is the digital changing the way we read and interpret literary and historical texts? What do we mean when we talk about digital projects? And how do we “make” them? ​​

As we know, the use of digital technology in the study of literary texts has steadily grown in recent decades, witnessing the production of various digital-born editions and the development of innovative digital tools, and also leading us to new ways of understanding textuality and the act of reading. In this sense, our April 7th event will present and discuss current work and research in digital humanities by providing a close look at ongoing “real life” projects, from digital editions to data and text analysis. It will incorporate some problems on categorization and textual samples from our course on Mestizo Studies related to tagging and visualizing information.

Guest Speakers

Isabella Magni is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the HathiTrust Research Center where she manages five digital humanities projects that tell the story of historically under-resourced and marginalized textual communities. She is co-principal investigator of the Petrarchive (digital edition of Petrarch’s songbook) and editor of Italian Paleography (website to learn how to read and contextualize primary sources). She is currently working on a digital edition of the Albizi Memorial Book and a monograph on forms and textualities of Medieval memorial books. Isabella recently co-edited a volume on Interpretation and visual poetics in Medieval and Early Modern texts (Brill, 2021) and edited a special issue on Digital Paleography for the Early Modern Digital Review.  This summer 2022 Isabella starts as TT Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Sheffield, UK.

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Paolo Scartoni is a Ph.D. student at Rutgers University. His research focuses on the relationship between musica speculativa and grammatica in Dante’s linguistics and poetics. He collaborates as an encoder at Petrarchive, the digital edition of Petrarch’s Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, and he participated in the Deiphira Project, the digital edition of a witness of Alberti’s Deiphira (Harvard Univ. Library). He is starting a new DH project, tentatively entitled Divine Networks: An Interactive Visualization of Dante’s Comedy, which maps the network of internal cross references among the 100 cantos of Dante’s Comedy. Prior to attending Rutgers, he earned a Master in Music from the Conservatory of Perugia (Italy), where he graduated in Historical Piano.

Resources

This section, created by Magni and Scartoni, lists basic tools for teaching with digital resources and offers links to explore digital humanities. Check the exercises on StoryMap and Storyline below or access the slide presentation here.

Timelines, storylines and maps for beginners (no need to code)

StoryMap JS. “Maps that tell stories.” https://storymap.knightlab.com/

Examples of projects using StoryMap JS: 

How to make a StoryMap: https://storymap.knightlab.com/#make 

Storyline JS. “Tell the story behind the numbers.” http://storyline.knightlab.com/#help 

Timeline JS. “Easy-to-make, beautiful timelines.” http://timeline.knightlab.com/ 

Examples of projects using Timeline JS:

How to make a Timeline: http://timeline.knightlab.com/#make 

TimeMapper: https://timemapper.okfnlabs.org/ 

Examples of projects using TimeMapper

How to make a TimeMapper: https://timemapper.okfnlabs.org/create 

Palladio. “Visualize complex historical data with ease.” http://hdlab.stanford.edu/palladio/  

Tutorials: http://hdlab.stanford.edu/palladio/help/ 

Testimonials: http://hdlab.stanford.edu/palladio/testimonials/ 

Publishing platforms for beginners (no need to code)

Scalar: “Born-digital, open source, media-rich scholarly publishing that’s as easy as blogging” https://scalar.me/anvc/scalar/ 

Examples of projects using Scalar:

Text Analysis (for beginners, no need to code)

Voyant: http://voyant-tools.org  

Tutorials:

HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) Analytics: https://analytics.hathitrust.org/ 

Tutorials: 

Text Encoding (more advanced)

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) https://tei-c.org/ 

TEI Guidelines: https://tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/index.html 

Online tutorials:

Software that will allow to transform your TEI files and build your edition:

Practice exercise(s)

Exercise #1: StoryMap JS

Example: Lorenzo Da Ponte in Europe and the USA 

See here (PDF) all the information behind each of the StoryMap slides.

Exercise #2: Storyline JS

Example: Price of Wool in Bruges 1390-1430

Steps:

  1. Research Question
  2. Data Collection (or Data Import)
  3. Data Cleaning
  4. (Data Visualization)
  5. Data Analysis
  6. (Data Visualization)

Link to our presentation slides and project(s)

Presentation Slides here (Google Slides)

NOTE: The head image is a screenshot from the excellent Petrarchive website, where Isabella is co-principal investigator and Paolo collaborates as encoder.

See here our poster in PDF and a smaller version for social media:

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