





































Humanist Studies & the Digital Age, 5.1 (2017) 
ISSN: 2158-3846 (online) 
http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ 
DOI: 10.7264/N3T1522C 

 

 
 

 

Digital Humanities and Italian Studies: Research Outcomes 

Crystal Hall 

 

Abstract  

This section presents new digital projects related to Italian Studies. Some of the essays included in 
here were delivered at the Modern Language Association 2017 Roundtable on the State of Digital 
Humanities in Italian Studies, sponsored by the Forum on 20th- and 21st- Century Italian. 

 

Introduction 

 This section grew from conversations at the Modern Language Association 2017 Roundtable 
on the State of Digital Humanities in Italian Studies, sponsored by the Forum on 20th- and 21st-
Century Italian. While the Roundtable was focused on professional questions for those working at 
the intersection of Digital Humanities and Italian Studies, the panelists and audience agreed that 
there is a continued need for documenting the specific research questions and results that are 
enabled by digital projects. Intentionally, panelists' research topics spanned diverse centuries, 
themes, genres, and objects within Italian Studies. That same diversity is represented in the four 
articles in this section: visual, spatial, textual, and aural culture from the Medieval through Modern 
periods. Each contribution adopts a different suite of analytical methods, but they all share a 
commitment to the value of a combined digital and non-digital investigation of Italian culture. The 
Digital Humanities projects from which this scholarship arises likewise represent different scopes 
and various stages of completion, highlighting both the importance of thoughtful project 
management and the opportunities to achieve results even in early phases of development.  

 These four pieces attest to the rich variety of outcomes within digital environments. The 
nature of digital, networked resources allows scholars to learn about their materials both in the 
creation of the project and through its eventual use. While the early stages of a project are often only 
available to the group of collaborators, once finished (or at least once they have been made public), 
the resources are available to the scholarly community. Excellent work has been done across Italian 
Studies to create digital projects.1 The articles in this section are an invitation to expand that 
networked community and the groups of users of these sites and tools. 

 The presentation of these projects and their research results is particularly timely, given the 
seemingly perpetual professional debate about the status of Digital Humanities (DH) and outcomes 

                                                      
1 For a preliminary list of networked resources and Digital Humanities Projects related to Italian Studies, see Crystal 
Hall, "Italian Studies and Digital Humanities: Examples of Projects and Resources," July 31, 2017. 
http://www.bowdoin.edu/~chall/ItalianDHResources.pdf  

http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/
https://dhis.mla.hcommons.org/2016/05/23/upcoming-roundtable-on-the-current-state-of-digital-humanities-in-italian-studies/
https://dhis.mla.hcommons.org/2016/05/23/upcoming-roundtable-on-the-current-state-of-digital-humanities-in-italian-studies/
http://www.bowdoin.edu/~chall/ItalianDHResources.pdf


Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Hall 

5.1 (2017)   67 

of DH-related research. Some of these concerns were echoed in the comments during the 
Roundtable, with a particular interest in how completely Digital Humanities can address the 
questions of the field of Italian Studies, how representative the material is, and if these approaches 
can offer a "whole picture" of the research question. Such concerns gesture towards anxiety about 
the dominance of technology that we feel in everyday life, a pervasiveness that would seem to erode 
the interactions, expressive media, and creative outlets that have long been the materials of 
humanistic study.  

 The four pieces here engage with that monolithic façade by critiquing the digital tools, 
applying them for their strengths, and acknowledging their limitations. Humanists are uniquely 
aware of the power relationships embedded in infrastructures, the potential blindspots in 
epistemologies, and the strength of representation. When Digital Humanities research is conducted 
by such self-aware humanists, the partnership with computational technologies is rich with 
discovery, as attested by the scholarship presented in this section. As for the anxieties about 
complete or total coverage, humanistic work has been at its strongest when it has been an 
interdisciplinary investigation of a carefully selected group of events, documents, or objects. For 
example, historians of art, materials, and intellectual traditions work with economists, social 
scientists, and literary scholars to better articulate the power and influence of the Medici court. DH 
offers a complementary set of methods and materials, not a totalizing or dominating final word on a 
subject or question. 

 As this scholarly space at the intersection of the two fields grows, awareness of the projects 
and possibilities will too, which is the purpose of this collection of essays. While each article offers 
specific contributions to subfields of Italian Studies, every piece also describes methods and their 
evaluation for those who are considering adding DH to their scholarly perspective. 

 Isabella Magni offers a poignant articulation of the research questions and preliminary 
answers derived from the Petrarchive, a collaborative endeavor involving Magni, Wayne H. Story, and 
John A. Walsh. The site is hosted by Indiana University and supported by an internal New Frontiers 
Start-up Grant. The project builds upon Storey's edition and commentary of Petrarch's Rerum 
vulgarium fragmenta (Rvf). Magni is particularly interested in the visual meaning of Petrarch's 
songbook. By focusing on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines for adding metadata to the 
text and the visual display options available through HTML, Magni explores the ways in which 
patterns of composition, use of page space, and scribal hands can add meaning to our understanding 
of Petrarch's poetics. The visual index created by the project team allows the scholar to have a 
comprehensive view of the manuscript structure of Vat. Lat. 3195, the partial holograph of the Rvf. 

 Using the privileged perspective afforded by this digital reconstruction of Petrarch's 366 
poems, Magni is able to pose and resolve a series of analytical questions that also incorporate 
historical contextualization, close reading, attention to figurative language, and a thematic 
understanding of the Rvf. The article investigates the place of Vat. Lat. 3195 in the shift from 
Medieval to Humanistic representations of texts, the poetic meaning encoded into blank page space 
(beyond the oft-mentioned seven blank pages preceding Rvf 264), and the phases of preparation of 
this unfinished partial holograph. As Magni demonstrates with multiple examples, the attentiveness 
to materiality while digitizing through encoding acts as an extension of philological practices, which 
add layers of understanding to the poetics of the Rvf. 

http://dcl.slis.indiana.edu/petrarchive/


Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Hall 

5.1 (2017)   68 

 An indirect strength of Magni's piece is the critical investigation of XML tagging (with TEI) 
and HTML encoding, two of the cornerstones for the retrieval of data, navigation of the web, and 
visualization of information. The thoughtfulness applied to the functionality of these digital 
structures moves certain aspects of this humanistic investigation toward a better understanding of 
the systems that currently mediate our world. Behind the scenes of this article (if it is being read 
through a browser window) are these very tools, operating so invisibly that they seem nonexistent. 
As Alan Liu (2012) has forcefully articulated, the a-critical consumption of these technologies gives 
them a power that humanists would interrogate and approach with skepticism if they were but 
removed from our immediate moment. By making the XML and HTML explicit actors in the 
construction of the analysis, Magni demonstrates their strength as a learning tool as well as their 
limitations for capturing other aspects of the text. 

  Similarly, Andrea Gazzoni engages with the capacities of geographic information systems 
(GIS) for representing the spatiality of Dante's Commedia. Gazzoni's project, Mapping Dante: A Study 
of Places in the Commedia, demonstrates the work that is possible for a single scholar using free 
software. After receiving initial funding through the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at the 
University of Pennsylvania in May 2015, Gazzoni was able to launch this interactive digital map of 
the 340 places named in the Divine Comedy in May 2016. The site takes advantage of full text of the 
passages that include one of these places, visualization of geographic patterns, cumulative 
information about the spatial references in the three cantiche, and a bimodal network visualization of 
the ways in which places connect the 100 canti through these references. The accumulation of spatial 
information about the Commedia offers the Dante scholar multiple entry points for evaluating 
apparent trends and exceptions to those trends within the historical and textual contexts of the 
poem. For scholars new to GIS, but interested in applying such analysis in their own research, 
Gazzoni's project description is a transparent and accessible guide to practical steps and theoretical 
considerations. 

 Mapping Dante capitalizes on the layered nature of GIS that facilitates connections between 
cartographic and non-cartographic data that results from intensive close reading of the entire 
Commedia. While being attentive to the fact that the patterns visualized on the map are subject to 
evaluation and interpretation, much like the features of the text themselves, Gazzoni highlights that 
the structure of such maps allows for a multiplicity of perspectives, multimodal expression, and the 
construction or deformation of different possible realities, and, as such "they end up resembling the 
ways medieval geography worked."  Like nearly all practitioners of literary GIS, Gazzoni directly 
confronts the challenge of uncertain, ambiguous, and fictional locations and a system, but 
approaches the issue as a non-diegetic mapping project which draws the user's attention specifically 
to the non-correspondence between the poem and the places mentioned within it. 

 By remaining vigilant about the affordances and the specific limitations of the GIS platform, 
Gazzoni is able to reveal how closer inspection of these patterns adds new layers of understanding 
to the poetics of the Commedia. The heterogeneity of Dante's use of spatial references is captured on 
the map through a series of analytical categories for each marker. In this way, Gazzoni highlights 
Dante's strategies for creating intimacy and distance with the reader through the use of different 
kinds of places. In one example, those sites that can be experienced in 14th-century Italy stand in 
sharp contrast to those that exist as ancient cultural symbols. The specificity of Gazzoni's reading of 
the text also allows for this kind of analysis to occur at the level of the speaker, considering the 
characterization of Cacciaguida or Beatrice, for example, via their references to specific cities or 

http://www.mappingdante.com/
http://www.mappingdante.com/


Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Hall 

5.1 (2017)   69 

regions, and earthly or heavenly sites. Overall, Gazzoni demonstrates how many new analytical 
doors can be opened by digitizing one aspect of a text in service of a specific question. 

 My contribution to this section articulates a similar result: in order to assess the rarity or 
commonality of the similarity between Galileo Galilei's prose and Ludovico Ariosto's poetry, I had 
to gather significant information about communities of early modern texts. Much like the patterns as 
yet unexplored in Mapping Dante or the Petrarchive, the indications of similarities between texts other 
than Galileo's letter on comets, Il Saggiatore (1623), and Ariosto's epic poem Orlando furioso (1532) 
remain to be analyzed.  As an exploratory part of the in-development project  Galileo's Library, this 
piece uses very elementary computational text analysis in conjunction with close reading and 
historical interpretation in order to explore the strength of the intertextuality between Galileo and 
his favorite author. For evaluation, that relationship is contextualized against the similarities between 
45 other texts and Ariosto's poem. The results are patterns that are interesting for my specific 
question, but open the doors for other questions about the authors in this small corpus of early 
modern and late Renaissance works. With the networked resources and opportunities for 
collaboration, Mapping Dante, the Petrarchive, and Galileo's Library are examples of resources awaiting 
communities of future users. 

 With the example of simple pattern matching of similar phrases, the contribution on 
Galileo's Ariosto expands the known contours of the stylistic fields delimited by Ariosto and 
Torquato Tasso's poetics in the sixteenth century. While only some of the similar phrases carry a 
literary or figurative value that adds meaning to the text, the remainder probe the contours of those 
communities across genre boundaries, and notably across chronological periods as well. By 
remaining in the relatively well-studied area of these literary debates about poetics, the article seeks 
to build trust in computational text analysis by exploring the textual relationships from multiple 
angles. There are more complex methods available (normalizing the texts, using fuzzy matching, or 
applying topic modeling), but with complexity comes further assumptions built into the code and 
further specificity for what patterns can be identified. By focusing on the text as it would have 
appeared to readers in the period, the process of analysis reflects my concerns about the 
contextualized understanding of textual similarity. In common with the other contributions in this 
section, the article promotes a critical, self-aware application of selected tool in service of a question, 
not for the sake of using a tool. 

 Serena Ferrando contributes a next step to this conversation, by describing how the 
collection of soundscape data can influence artistic and scholarly understanding of an urban 
environment, and then engaging the public that inhabits that urban space in the presentation and 
analysis of the results. Audioscan Milano uses sounds from 1,580 recordings in Milan's piazzas and 
streets to create music that is digitally mapped in an interactive multimedia installation. The project 
finds historical roots in the Studio di Filologia Musicale and inspiration in the musical theorization 
of noise. The critical engagement with the technologies and methods of remixing stays at the 
forefront of the Audioscan project for the express purpose of building a stronger engagement with 
the audience. This can be seen both in the database of recordings available to the public and the 
interactive installations that invited participation from visitors. 

 Ferrando offers an historical analysis of the earlier Studio and its reincarnation in the 
Audioscan Milano project. With attentiveness to the capacities and shortcomings of technology for 
accessing and documenting urban sounds, the article outlines the roles of the artists and the urban 
dwellers in consuming, processing, and evaluating that soundscape. While there is significant overlap 

https://research.bowdoin.edu/galileos-library/
http://www.giorgiosancristoforo.net/2013/01/03/project-audioscan-transforming-city-noise-into-music/


Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Hall 

5.1 (2017)   70 

in the interest of both parties, Ferrando highlights the disparities of knowledge and analysis that 
make the recordings valuable to each group. Importantly, the complex artistic and scholarly work of 
remixing the urban sounds into music was the least understood or accessible to the public audience. 
The interactive database instead generated the most widespread interest. 

 The Audioscan Milano results gesture toward an important aspect of digital, and digital 
humanities work. The ubiquity of electronic and digital media would suggest a cultural accessibility 
that borders on transparency, when in fact the critical assumptions, epistemologies, intellectual 
argumentation, and peer evaluation within those digital infrastructures is nearly always opaque. 
Artists, historians, literary scholars, and cultural scholars contribute in meaningful ways to the 
uncovering and analysis of those structures. Magni, Gazzoni, myself, and Ferrando all offer avenues 
of exploration into the technology while suggesting the valuable research results that can be 
achieved with its application. 

 We have completed this work fully aware that, in its most extreme expression, Digital 
Humanities work has been criticized as empiricist, secular, and reductive of the creativity of human 
expression to a mathematical elegance that perhaps no longer carries the evocative mysteries of the 
original object or experience of it. Yet, these essays suggest the opportunities for humanists who 
control the methods rather than be controlled by them. The critical, selective application shifts the 
balance of power toward a humanist perspective, articulates a thoughtful and powerful 
epistemology, in the name of better understanding how our materials communicate meaning to our 
audience. In a future in which the public role of the humanities will likely continue to be debated, 
this nexus of the causality of algorithmic formulae and the open-endedness of multiple, often 
ambiguous, layered interpretations could very well be the site for declaring the connection between 
our valuable work as humanists and ultracontemporary societal concerns.  

 

 


