





































Humanist Studies & the Digital Age, 5.1 (2017) 
ISSN: 2158-3846 (online) 
http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ 
DOI: 10.7264/N32J698P 

 

 
 

Scholarly Networks and Collaborative Practices 

Proceedings of the Colloquium held at Brown University on April 16-18, 2015 

Massimo Riva 

 

Abstract 

The sections “Perspectives” and “Interventions” of this issue of Humanist Studies & the 
Digital Age present a selection from the proceedings of a colloquium held at Brown 
University in the spring of 2015. The event was hosted by the Virtual Humanities Lab in the 
Department of Italian Studies (VHL), in collaboration with the Center for Digital 
Scholarship in the Brown University Library (CDS), and DARIAH-Italy (Digital Research 
Infrastructure for the Arts and the Humanities). Its aim was to explore the new types of 
scholarly output produced when scholars use digital methods to collaborate on, annotate and 
visualize traditional materials.  

 

Introduction 

In the age of data mining, distant reading, topic modeling and cultural analytics, 
scholars and researchers in the humanities increasingly rely upon automated, algorithm-
based procedures in order to parse their exponentially growing databases of digitized textual 
and visual resources. Yet, within this deeply networked and massively interactive 
environment, it is crucial to preserve the expert logic of primary and secondary sources, 
textual stability, citations, and other apparatus, which form the heritage and legacy of 
humanities scholarship. Digital editions, for example, must now live in the networked 
environment built within digital library repositories: emerging curatorial and editorial 
practices and the semantic act of interpretation are increasingly embedded together into the 
primary sources and such practices are also the conduit for training the next generation of 
digital humanists. In short, scholarly collaboration must problematize methodology, tools 
and interpretation at the same time.  

Humanities researchers increasingly collaborate, in a laboratory mode, on shared 
platforms and in shared virtual environments, experimenting with open source tools often 
developed elsewhere, in the annotation and visualization of select corpora of primary 
sources. In the process, they produce new and yet unidentified typologies of scholarly 
objects (thoroughly embedded in library repositories) that incorporate curatorial and 
interpretive practices along with a new, and fully documented, technical instrumentation. 
This hybrid form of collaborative curation/publication is at the foundation of humanities 
scholarship in the digital age. In the Brown Colloquium, scholars from the U.S., the U.K., 

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and Italy shared their ideas, diverse experience, and work-in-progress related to one or more 
of these aspects: new data-driven collaborative practices; the intersection of traditional 
scholarly methods and emerging computerized techniques; the new research infrastructure 
(digital library repositories and tools); the institutional framework within which computer-
aided practices in the humanities may thrive.  

The topics addressed in the colloquium also reflect the evolution of the collaborative 
activities conducted within the framework of the VHL since its creation in 2004 (thanks to a 
two-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities) by contributing scholars 
located in the U.S., Europe (Italy and the U.K.), Latin America (Mexico and Argentina), and 
Australia. In its original configuration, the VHL included a platform for the collaborative 
online editing, annotating and publishing of a variety of classic texts in Italian and Latin. It 
aimed to create an online environment in which scholars could train themselves in the new 
practices while attending at their editorial and scholarly work. More recently, in collaboration 
with the CDS at the Brown Library, the VHL has also embraced projects focused on the 
development of enriched digital library collections and archives, such as the Garibaldi 
Panorama & the Risorgimento Archive, and the Theater that Was Rome, both based on 
special collections of the Brown University library. These projects, and others under 
consideration, are particularly focused on visualization techniques and tools, including 
geospatial resources. 

In his key-note address at the colloquium, entitled “The HathiTrust Research Center: 
Bringing you 4.7 billion pages of analytic opportunities!,” J. Stephen Downie, associate dean 
for research and professor at the School of Information Sciences of the University of 
Illinois, and the Illinois codirector of the HathiTrust Research Center, described the 
unprecedented opportunities offered to scholars across disciplinary boundaries by advanced 
digital library infrastructures, such as that built by the Hathi Trust consortium. This not only 
provides access to an ever-growing corpus of textual data but also creates an environment in 
which scholars can produce, store and share their annotated datasets, according to the topics 
of their research, thus contributing to generate what we may call collaborative curatorial 
practices that go beyond data mining into the realm of data sharing and perhaps also new 
forms of publication. This is entirely consistent with the original inspiration of the VHL, 
although clearly realized on a much larger scale, which poses the question: how can relatively 
small-scale projects such as the VHL take advantage of large-scale infrastructures such as 
Hathi Trust? Indeed, another aspect of the networked research environment in which 
scholars are increasingly able to collect, share and publish their data, along with their own 
analyses and conclusions based on those data, is the transformation of traditional forms of 
humanities publication, as we shall see also further on. These can be spearheaded by a 
synergy between large infrastructural digital library resources and highly focused, project-
centered research “environments” which, like the VHL, aim to highlight special library 
collections, in what could be defined a “curatorial” mode. 

With the dramatic increase in scope of digital resources, data-driven projects are a 
potentially new area of development for the VHL: in organizing this colloquium, we were 
particularly interested in exploring new collaborative possibilities in the area of text analysis 
and “distant reading,” including such emerging methodologies as topic modeling, text 
clustering, sentiment analysis, network analysis, but also geolocative and geospatial 
visualization techniques (the use of data-generated maps to parse a textual and visual corpus, 



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for example, as in a project recently developed within the framework of the Garibaldi & the 
Risorgimento digital archive, The Garibaldi Resource Explorer: 
http://library.brown.edu/cds/garibaldi/resources/fullexplorer.php).  

A critical overview of these emerging methodologies was presented at the 
colloquium by Fabio Ciotti, of DARIAH, Italy (his paper could not be included in these 
proceedings having been already accepted for publication elsewhere). The methodologies 
listed above are central to the debate about data mining in, and for, the humanities and the 
related discussions about the “ontological statute” of humanistic data. In what is perhaps the 
most technical contribution to these proceedings, Dino Buzzetti (emeritus professor of the 
University of Bologna and a founding member of the Brown-Bologna Pico della Mirandola 
project) and Ernesto Priani (a researcher at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 
and also a member of the Pico project) address these issues from a specific point of view: 
namely, how an annotated digital edition of Pico della Mirandola’s Conclusiones Nongentae (one 
of the ongoing projects in the VHL) could benefit from the integration of traditional 
editorial and publishing practices with the newly emerging computational methods.  

A digital edition of, and commentary on, Pico’s 900 theses (as the Conclusiones are also 
known), Pico’s own critical compilation and theoretical “parsing” of hundreds of sources 
from all philosophical and theological textual traditions known to him, would indeed greatly 
benefit from the possibility of eliciting the help of automated techniques in order to 
reconstruct the intricate intertextual web of quotations and references often only implicitly 
embedded, or alluded to, in Pico’s text.  Buzzetti and Priani discuss the merits and 
limitations of the new text analysis and data mining methods “introduced to inspect word 
contexts and vocabularies, through the classification of texts, the development of ontologies, 
and the identification of lexical similarities.” Their preliminary conclusion – “Intertextuality 
becomes then the theoretical foundation of further digital implementations” - is also the 
point of departure of their proposal of a topic modeling approach to the next phase of the 
Pico editorial and publishing project. In short, “finding the sources of Pico’s theses in an 
author’s corpus is a matter of context and intertextuality,” they write. From this point of 
view, they consider vector space modeling - a method to capture the relative importance (or 
weight) of a term in a document - promising. Equally worth consideration is, in their 
opinion, the approach of The Concept Lab, a research project at the University of 
Cambridge led by Peter de Bolla, because of its distinction between word senses and 
concepts: this is “particularly relevant in relation to Pico’s theses, since his vocabulary, 
depending as it does on the need to demonstrate the genuine concordance of all 
philosophical positions, is not necessarily the same as that of the authors they are ascribed 
to.” 

Buzzetti and Priani then go on to describe an experiment conducted in collaboration 
with the Grupo de Ingeniería Linguistica of the Instituto de Ingeniería of the UNAM, in 
which an attempt is made to locate Pico’s “sixteen conclusions according to Albert the 
Great” in the latter’s corpus. The methods and tools thus tested (the Cosine Similarity 
method, the MALLET, and the word2vec packages) suggest several interesting analytical 
steps. Without delving into the technicalities addressed in the article, the benefit of a topic 
modeling approach consists for the authors in its integrative rather than alternative potential, 
in relation to more traditional scholarly methods: “Distant and close reading can then meet 
and in defiance of the common opinion they can effectively show their complementarity.” 



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This is particularly promising for a machine-aided annotated edition of Pico’s work: “a 
controlled annotation language, obtained out of topic modeling and co-occurrence results, 
would possibly enable an intermediary course of action between manual and automated 
procedures, consisting for instance in a formalised annotation practice.” The last section of 
the article takes into consideration another set of techniques and evaluates their potential 
use, namely how machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) can contribute to process 
annotation data through the application of probabilistic soft logic (PSL). Again, skipping the 
most technical (and analytically useful) part and jumping to their conclusions, the authors’ 
analysis shows “that both close and distant reading can play similar roles in respect of 
quantitative as opposed to qualitative, or factual as opposed to conceptual approaches, and 
that they can both be regarded as complementary practices.”   

A similar “critical” and experimental approach to emerging techniques and 
methodologies informs the contribution by Michael Papio, “Geospatial Visualizations for 
the Study of Boccaccio.” Papio asks a very general question: what can mapmaking do to help 
us better understand the life and work of a medieval author such as Boccaccio? This 
question relates both to Papio’s own engagement with Boccaccio’s work as a “geographer” 
and “topographer” in De Montibus, and is not unrelated to pedagogical practices recently 
developed within the framework of the oldest among the VHL projects, the Decameron 
Web, that Papio contributed to create, back in the late 1990s. (These practices include 
collaborative class exercises in the mapping of the Decameron text according to geolocative 
coordinates such as that designed by Nicole Gercke: the places mentioned, or alluded to, in 
the text, are located onto a historical map, the fifteenth century Catalan Atlas, layered over 
Google maps). In short, Papio sets out to test the idea that “geospatial representations of 
Boccaccio’s world – a few pages taken from an unfinished Boccaccio atlas, so to speak – 
may... provide insights into additional things that had escaped our notice.”  

Simple visualization tools such a cluster map linked to word frequency may show 
what we already know: for instance, that “the Decameron is tightly moored to those areas its 
author knew from actual experience,” or that “the Decameron is substantially Tuscan (which 
will come as a shock to no one).” Yet, the more “granular” our data parsing is, the more 
interesting are the potential analytical results: “in a collection of tales that seem to have been 
kept generally close to geographical areas known personally by their author, never is there 
mention of that handful of city blocks he knew as his own,” that is the Oltrarno 
neighborhood around 1352. (Cross-referencing these data with other data, such as for 
example those retrievable from the Catasto and Tratte databases, also part of the VHL, 
could enhance even further our picture of Boccaccio’s Florence). Referring to Betrand 
Westphal (one of the driving forces of geocriticism) and his idea of the “unstable hierarchy 
of places” in the Middle Ages, Papio provides very useful considerations about the best way 
to take critical advantage of geographical visualizations: “The idea that geographical locations 
were unstable may seem to us, who have Google maps in our phones and a GPS in our cars, 
to be a curious concept.” For a correct adjustment, we need first of all to be aware of the 
state of medieval cartography. (Layering a historical map such as the Catalan Atlas or 
medieval portolani, for example, over a geopositioned Google map can also provide an 
interesting measure of the distortion and instability of both systems).   “The instability of 
geolocations across time and space is an especially productive notion for Boccaccio Studies,” 
Papio writes, forcing us to look at the way “geopositioning” worked, in the late Middle Ages, 
based on textual traditions rather than computer-generated numeric coordinates; and making 



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us reflect on “the benefits of using maps to reconstruct a literary reality, even one distorted 
by time, that existed hundreds of years earlier.” A geocritical exercise thus requires a certain 
degree of historical imagination. In short, as the rest of Papio’s essay illustrate, it is precisely 
this multidimensionality that makes geocritical imagination tick: plotting or mapping 
Boccaccio’s world not by arbitrarily superimposing our own geographical representations on 
it, but by retrieving the depth of his own unstable, literary “geolocative” system.  “Up to 
now -Papio writes - preference has been given to how geospatial approaches can open doors 
in literary studies; the reverse is of course just as true.” In conclusion, Papio suggests, 
“intelligent maps based on thoughtful criteria can lead to new areas of research, or at the 
very least can provide geospatial paratexts that will be useful to research that is already in full 
swing.” Again, as in the case of the Pico project, it is the cross-fertilization of traditional 
humanistic scholarship and computational visualization techniques that seems to produce 
the best results.  

The other two contributions from the Brown colloquium presented here address the 
crucial question posed by the institutional framework of the new research infrastructure, 
from two different points of view: Guyda Armstrong and Marilyn Deegan summarize in 
their essay the results of a two-year investigation, sponsored by the Arts and Humanities 
Research Council in the U.K., about emerging forms of digital publication in the humanities, 
focusing in particular on the “digital monograph”; John Cayley (a professor of Literary Arts 
at Brown University, and an award-winning author of electronic literature) reflects on the 
way digital repositories could, and should, become the springboard for open, “creative” 
collaborative practices in the arts and the humanities. Let’s begin with the latter contribution, 
which appears here in a video format in the section “Interventions” of this issue of the 
journal Digital Humanities & the Digital Age. The long subtitle of Cayley’s presentation sums 
up the fundamental question he addresses: how can we persuade universities to own their 
responsibilities to the practice-based research that they patronize – while bringing new, fully-
accredited methodologies and infrastructures to Arts and Humanities scholarship? The “we” 
in this title-sentence refers to scholars interested not only in the opportunities offered by the 
digital infrastructure being built but willing to actively contribute to the designing of this 
infrastructure. Cayley’s perspective is that of a “practitioner of digital literary arts,” interested 
in particular in the linguistic dimension of digital artistic practices. However, his argument 
applies also to humanities research more broadly conceived. With the shift toward the digital 
infrastructure, and the confusion which still surrounds definitions of the digital humanities, it 
seems that our attention as textual scholars has turned from the text to the indexing of 
textual resources. Massive (and according to Cayley “catastrophic”) restructuring of the 
publishing industry and unprecedented access to digitally represented (big) data, are the two 
main events we face, as scholars-practitioners in both the arts and humanities. The 
(academic) book is dead, according to Cayley, “students don’t read books anymore,” and the 
codex exists only as an archive (of individual research). Yet nothing has yet replaced the 
“book” as the corner stone of careers and, we may add, the main tool for sharing the results 
of research in the humanities (and perhaps also the non-digital “literary arts”).  

The sweeping nature of these statements is intentionally provocative: his 
contribution, Cayley says, is partially a “manifesto.” His point of departure, certainly shared 
among those attending the colloquium is that scholars have to take active part in the 
“indexing” enterprise (not leaving it to Google & Co.) and universities must lead this effort, 
or better, enable scholars to lead this effort, in a participative and collaborative way. Yet, this 



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enterprise is more than “indexing” knowledge. As the digital data produced in research is 
feeding, or, in jargon, is being increasingly “ingested” into, universities’ repositories, scholars 
should be able to rely upon these repositories (rather than the “cloud,” for example)  for 
archiving their work-in-progress: the datasets that are the equivalent of “field-notes,” drafts, 
compilations of annotated materials of various nature that they use in order to produce 
outcomes and “results” (still mostly fashioned or packaged as articles, books, etc.). This 
would not only guarantee against obsolescence (and dependence on market services) but 
would potentially change the nature of what “publication” is going to be in the future: new 
forms of repository-based publication will necessarily include the data collected and curated 
in the process of research, providing an account of both the “how” (the methodology) and 
“what” (the data) of a specific research. Institutional policies and practices should enable and 
encourage this process. 

The future of the academic book in this changing landscape is the object of the final 
contribution presented here from the Brown colloquium. As the authors write: “Declining 
monograph sales, rising serials prices, funding problems, rapidly-changing new technologies, 
shifting policy landscapes, increasing pressure on academics to do more with less, all 
contribute to a sense of unease about the health of the academic book in the arts and 
humanities, and indeed about the health of the disciplines themselves.” In sketching out the 
results of the AHRC-sponsored survey, mostly centered on the U.K. but extending its reach 
also to North America, Armstrong and Deegan provide a more varied scenario than that 
envisioned by Cayley: “new developments...may point to diverse futures for different kinds 
of books – they write.  Some of these are infrastructural and hold out promise of sustainable 
models; others are individual and experimental, and may point to some new and interesting 
possibilities.  We need both, but we must bear in mind that some of the new models will not 
stand the test of time.” Proclaiming once again the “end of books,” as a famous New York 
Times article by the writer Robert Coover did already back in 1992, may be, again, premature 
(Coover, the founder of the program in digital literary arts at Brown left his position to 
Cayley). Yet, the cautionary character of the Academic Book of the Future (ABFR) report – “we 
have observed an enduring attachment to print that is neither sentimental nor habitual: print 
just happens to do some things particularly well, and will no doubt continue to do so” – may 
be also conditioned in turn by its specific point of view: the future of the academic book 
(Coover’s article mostly referred to the future of storytelling). This said, it should be added 
that while Cayley’s position is also a somewhat “militant” one, a manifesto in favor of an 
innovative approach to publishing methods and knowledge sharing in the humanities, the 
ABFR provides instead a snapshot of the current state of affairs, including the results of 
inquiries bridging the “old” and the “new.” Armstrong and Deegan for example cite “the 
Robb (2015) review of Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World by Naomi Baron” 
which “in a survey of over 300 university students in the U.S., Japan, Germany, and 
Slovakia...found a near-universal preference for print, especially for serious reading” (which 
seems to straightforwardly contradict what Cayley stated in his presentation). Yet, these 
results should be probably adjusted to the relative percentage of time that the students 
surveyed actually spend reading books and reading online (two different kinds of reading, as 
we assume).  

The snapshot of the current state of affairs is a very useful one, however, and the 
necessary point of departure for any attempt to predict, or envision, a possible future. The 
article touches upon many aspects of the problem, including: the technological side (or 



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platforms) available and under experimentation; the (broad) typology of academic genres 
which may or may not have a braver future in the new world of knowledge sharing in the 
humanities (digital editions, or e-journals, for example); the effect of emerging digital 
rhetoric on the printed page (the output may still be print but the process of researching and 
writing is increasingly digital); the issues of obsolescence and preservation, touched above 
and also Cayley’s most urgent concern as an artist  (the more  innovative and experimental 
the emerging forms are, the greater the risk of obsolescence seems to be); the nature of the 
“enhanced monograph,” the long- and single-author-form which is the cornerstone of 
careers in the humanities, and still the main carrier of symbolic value (with the imprint of a 
prestigious publisher), in the age of “open access”; and, last but not least, the economic 
sustainability of it all (the various private-public partnership models which make both the 
experimentation with new forms, and their establishment as models and standards, possible).  

Many of these issues can be usefully considered from different points of view as well: 
that of the individual scholar, that of the scholarly community, that of a specific discipline, 
that of a specific institution (private and public universities, foundations, government 
agencies), that of publishers, even that of the “general audience,” the humanities community 
at large etc. The complexity of these points of view, combined in what is sometimes referred 
to as the new “eco-system” of knowledge producing and sharing in the humanities, allows us 
to grasp the complexity involved in envisioning the role which “the academic book of the 
future,” or what will eventually, possibly, replace the book, may have in it (including the 
Ph.D. dissertation which of the academic book is often the incunabulum).  

The article goes on to review a number of current projects, of various nature and 
scale, which can provide at least a glimpse at the richness and variety of the experimentations 
in progress with both born-digital formats and/or the translation or hybridization of 
traditional scholarly outputs into the digital environment. Being myself currently involved in 
one of the many experiments with the “digital monograph,” supported by the Mellon 
foundation in partnership with a number of North American academic presses and 
university libraries, I can see both the pros and cons of this enterprise to redesign the 
“book” as one of many “unidentified scholarly objects” on the horizon: this is not the venue 
to share my own insights based on this experience. Yet, I can perhaps conclude by saying 
that one of the fundamental issues for us today remains how to balance preservation and 
innovation: I mean “preservation,” in both a specific sense and in the broader sense of the 
transmission of scholarly forms which have proven their value in the long past, including the 
printed book; and innovation, in both a specific sense, and in the broader sense of the 
comprehensive transformation of traditional scholarly forms and the emerging of new ones 
more adapted to thrive in the new knowledge ecology.  

It could sometimes feel like a balancing act, and we can be tempted, from time to 
time, to tip that balance in one sense or the other, to abandon the “old” or resist the “new.” 
In fact, what the Brown colloquium has confirmed is that the most productive attitude is an 
open, critical, pragmatic, and experimental one which sees “traditional” and “new” forms as 
cross-fertilizing and reshaping each other in a synergetic way.  This has been the inspiration 
of the Virtual Humanities Lab, since its creation.    

 


