Paolo Monella Post-doc scholarship in Digital Humanities Accademia dei Lincei, Rome 2012

Meetings, talks and conferences

3 October 2011

First meeting with Tito Orlandi and Raul Mordenti (Rome, 3 October 2011): this Google document includes some initial thoughts I had prepared for the meeting.

12 January 2012

Meeting with Tito Orlandi, Raul Mordenti, Lorenzo Perilli, Paola Morelli at the Centro Linceo Interdisciplinare (Rome, 12 January 2012)

Conclusions of the Meeting (things to do):

• Raul Mordenti will organize a seminar on textual modelling in the Zibaldone Laurenziano
• Paolo Monella will work on a review of existing digital projects
  • starting from a specific category of projects, e.g. epigraphy
  • starting from projects and arriving to methodological principles
• Isabella will share the review of the TEI projects that she has already done
  • TEI works only on texts organized in book divided in chapters
  • out of that type of text, personalizations are required (which are very difficult)
  • so most researchers use TEI Lite
  • XML/TEI could be used only as an interchange format between projects
  • the real formalizations lying behind many projects are not TEI (and it's OK)
• Paola Moscati will work with Tito Orlandi on a project for a digital museum
• Luciano Perilli will be kept up to date and will give his contribution if anything interestes him.

16 January 2012

Meeting with Tito Orlandi: the project of a digital scholarly edition is born (Rome, 16 January 2012).

1 February 2012

Skype meeting with Tito Orlandi: what should be the Humanities training of a student of Digital Humanities? (1 February 2012).

5 March 2012

Meeting with prof. Orlandi (Rome, 5 March 2012). Bibliograpy: Ghislain Viré. Planning: I should give a talk on digital editions in Spring 2012. My notes:

• Ghislain Virè, a classical philologist, has worked in the '70s and '80s on a scholarly edition of Hyginus, that has later published in print, but has worked on it with digital instruments. She has thought on the methodological and modelling issues very well. She might have written a paper for the Paris conference in 1978. She exposed her reflections on the matter on her Hyginus edition. In the CISADU OPAC search "Virè". Most important is: VIRÉ, Ghislaine, Informatique et classement des manuscrits. Essai méthodologique sur le De astronomia d'Hygin, Bruxelles, Éditions de l'Université de Bruxelles, 1986, 100 p., Sources et Instruments, n.8. Viré has thought on the difference between "variant" and "variant locus".
• April-May 2012: I'll give a seminar with the results of my review on digital editions. I will go from the review proper of existing projects to the methodological matters. The audience should include Lincei members like Simonetti, Stussi, Serianni, Segre.
• Focuses of my review:
  1. digital scholarly editions;
  2. classical and romance texts (especially Italian), including Orlandi's Machiavelli;
  3. also big corpora like the Victorian women writers project (Univ. of Indiana, dealing with manuscripts); start from C. Pusceddu's E-Philology.
• On Fridays Orlandi is at the Augustinianum Institute. He normally comes to the Accademia on Mondays and then Tuesdays or Wednesdays. He is away from Rome from March 22. He will be back on March 26. We'll meet anyways next Thursday (March 9), and then in the week after March 26.

8 March 2012

Meeting of the Professori distaccati at the Centro Linceo Interdisciplinare (Rome, 8 March 2012). My notes:

Prof. Carlo Barbante exposes his "Early human impact" research project. Human impact on climate change dates back to prehistory (higher concentrations of methane and carbon dioxide due to forests burning from the one side, temperature on the other side). Methodology: "natural archives" such as ice and lake cores (in Anctartica and in other continents).

27 March 2012

Meeting with Tito Orlandi on Viré's book (Rome, 27 March 2012).

29 March 2012

Meeting with Tito Orlandi. Planning: talks I should give and conferences I should go to (Rome, 29 March 2012). My notes:

Seminars

• I should give a 45' talk at the Accademia dei Lincei about "Where are the DH right now?" (around May 2012). I should outline the state of the art in 4 or 5 nations (UK, USA, Germany etc.) as compared to Italy
• The other talk I should give, on digital editions, is postponed.
• I should also attend (as a listener) The Cologne Dialogue on Digital Humanities 2012.

Resources: Books

Books that Prof. Orlandi pointed out to me for my "Where are the DH right now?" seminar (more details on the books and related resources):

• Debates in the Digital Humanities
• A Companion to Digital Humanities

(I added a couple more in my working notes).

Other resources

• Andrew Prescott's inaugural lecture at DDH: An Electric Current of the Imagination
• Claire Warwick's inaugural lecture at UCLDH: The monologue in a crowdsourced world: have digital resources rendered the inaugural lecture obsolete?
• Thread "Modelling mind" in Humanist
• DH Commons
• CenterNet and other 'aggregating' centres
• Jahrbuch für Computerphilologie (unfortunately no longer active since 2006)
• Groff software for desktop writing
• Thread "DH books" in Humanist
• Book Icon programming for humanists, by Alan D. Corré
• This and this posts in this thread, first entitled "relations", then "CS and the disciplines". In the same thread, Abelson's quote in this post is not to the point
• Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs (Canada-wide association di DH)
• [Humanist] 25.850 classifying grammatical structures?: someone asking the "right" questions, but yet unanswered
• Where is "informatica" placed in MIUR disciplines tree?

2 April 2012

Meeting with Tito Orlandi (Rome, 2 April 2012). My notes:

• The theoretical "frame" is now ready. Let's experiment and see what happens
• Sampson: writing is a language
• Intentio scribae

6 April 2012

Skype meeting with Tito Orlandi (6 april 2012). My notes:

Cologne Dialogue

I'll attend the Cologne Dialogue on Digital Humanities 2012 (23-24 April 2012).

[I later attended to this conference. Here are the notes I took at the conference and a shorter report)].

Seminar scheduled for 10 May 2012

On 10 May 2012 (same period as the meetings of the Accademia dei Lincei), 3.00-5.30 PM, at Centro Linceo Interdisciplinare, we'll hold a seminar on Digital Philology.

Timing:

• 10' Tito Orlandi: introduction on the reasons why this seminar was organised
• 30' Raul Mordenti: the digital representation of the text of the Zibaldone Laurenziano
• 30' Paolo Monella: The scholarly digital edition (why are they so few and why many of those that are there are not satisfactory)

Discussion (and also interruption of speakers by the audience) will be encouraged.

The audience will be made of members of the Accademia dei Lincei. Mostly DH-skeptical philologists and literature critics.

We'll try to show that the principles of the Humanities remane the same even in the digital environment, Orlandi says.

7 May 2012

Meeting with Tito Orlandi (Rome, 7 May 2012). My notes:

My talk on 20 June 2012

• In the meeting of 20 (not 21) June 2012 Raul Mordenti will talk about e-Philoogy.
• I'll talk about e-Philology only in my post-doc final report.
• In the 20 June 2012 meeting I'll just talk about "Where is DH now?"
• I will also list the big DH centres and organisations worldwide

Bookmarks

Keep an eye on the Association for History and Computing.

Agenda

1. Talk at the Accademia dei Lincei 20 giugno 2012
2. London WiP at the end of July (Babel)
3. Verona Conference in September (if my abstract gets approved)
4. Review of digital editions: finalise the work
5. Prototype of digital edition: I must work on it too aside the 'theoric' work on digital editions' "review"

25 September 2012

Notes of my meeting with prof. Orlandi (Rome, 25 September 2012):

• Tustep: an environment. See L. Perilli, Filologia computazionale
• Bodmer papyri: Roca Puig published them (facsimile)

26 November 2012

Notes of my meeting with prof. Orlandi.

I told Orlandi:

• prototype
• what text I'll edit
  • vespa
  • 99 lines, 2 MSS
• some textual features I'll represent
  • textual layers
  • sign table
• Turing conference (Rome, 22 november 2012)

Orlandi told me:

• final report of my post-doc scholarship
  • due before their March meeting
• it should include
  • a rationale of my prototype edition
  • some snipplets of code
  • the results of a collation
• issue of overlapping (even just at the graphemic layer): <a>text1<b>text2</a>text3</b>
  • the Turing Machine implies this issue
  • only solutions:
    • either only dealing with sequences of discrete objects
    • or transforming the above into: <a>text1</a><ab>text2</ab><b>text3</b> (assuming that they in fact are three different things)
    • or multiplicating the layers of representation
      • layer 1: <a>text1 text2</a>text3
      • layer 2: text1<b>text2 text3</b>