IDEA: Isabella d’Este Archive is redesigned, and back online. IDEA includes manuscript visualizations, videos, and a virtual model of Isabella d’Este’s famous studiolo as well as a Zotero bibliography of materials relating to Isabella and the Italian Renaissance. See IDEA’s News link for book announcements and other relevant notices.
This online exhibition consists of 93 different documents in Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, Dutch, Spanish, German, Italian and Armenian, from archives in the Netherlands, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Egypt and Malta, all of which house paper-based records of administrative, financial and commercial activity between the late fourteenth and early eighteenth centuries. The exhibition thus samples some of the most relevant paper-based formats and documentary genres used to codify commercial information and financial value by different communities around the Mediterranean.
The exhibition was organized by José María Pérez Fernández (U. of Granada), Giovanni Tarantino (U. of Florence) Matteo Calcagni (European University Institute), as one of the activities conducted by “Paper in Motion”, which was in turn one of the four Work Groups of the PIMo COST Action. People in Motion (PIMo): Entangled Histories of Displacement across the Mediterranean (1492–1923)
Some relevant contents include the following:
Continue reading “Paper in Motion: Information and the Economy of Knowledge in the Early Modern Mediterranean”
Rara Magnetica (1269-1599) is the name of Gustav Hellmann’s well known anthology published in 1898. With this collection, he sought to provide access to some of the earliest, yet rare publications in the field of geomagnetism that predated William Gilbert’s landmark publication De Magnete of 1600. The digital project and platform Rara Magnetica translates these efforts into the digital domain, going far beyond digital editions.
The need to publish important but understudied sources is most efficiently achieved by providing curated digital structured and linked data. Rara Magnetica hence – as an ongoing project – is both a repository and an interactive research platform. It publishes scans and transcriptions of (many hitherto unpublished) sources, data visualizations, and databases, all related to the premodern study of magnetism. Moreover, it provides various tools to investigate each of these resources independently and in combination. A major aim in fact is to enhance multimodal analyses that transcend media barriers by allowing to research imagery along with full texts, material sources along with their conceptual content. This is achieved by various but interlinked tools providing different ways of looking at the same sources.
https://qspace.library.queensu.ca/handle/1974/14832
Renaissance Polychrome Sculpture in Tuscany is an open-access database of high-resolution photographs of and information (with a catalog entry and bibliography for each sculpture) about over 350 objects. Thousands of photographs are freely available for download and can be used without charge in research, teaching, and publication. An interactive digital map, colour coded by material, shows the current location of each object. The database would be of interest to scholars and students of art, materials and techniques, miraculous images, portraiture, gender representations, domestic devotion, altarpieces, hagiography, the history of childhood, orphanages, hospitals, pilgrimages, color, the surface or skin of an object, and other topics. (This database was created by Una D’Elia, Heather Merla, Rachel Boyd, and Bronwyn Bond, working with a team of librarians at Queen’s University, headed by Rosarie Coughlin.)
The DUCAC project – “Dubrovnik Civitas et Acta Consiliorum. Visualizing Development of the Late Medieval Urban Fabric” studied the relationships between the space-policy of the Dubrovnik government, its implementation, and the real changes in the urban fabric. The archival investigation examined the deliberations of the city councils (the Major, the Minor, and the Senate) from the first half of the 15th century. These deliberations are written down in 35 volumes. They have 7,972 folia, i.e. 15,944 pages, written predominantly in Latin. Focusing on topics of interest to art historians, the deliberations revealing information on the urban fabric – more precisely information about its construction, use, maintenance, as well as the management of these processes, were transcribed. The number of the total counted transcribed deliberations is 3341. They are offered in a map searchable database where deliberations can be found in accordance with the location of the building or the space they record. Only some of these newly discovered documents were thoroughly studied so far, comparing the data from the deliberations with the existing urban tissue and previously collected architectural, photographic, and archival documentation. These studies resulted in 2D or 3D visualizations, and are duly listed on the project web page. The database still offers abundant data for further in-depth research of Dubrovnik urban history.
http://www.prdl.org/
A select database of digital books relating to the development of theology and philosophy during the Reformation and Post-Reformation/Early Modern Era (late 15th-18th c.). Late medieval and patristic works printed and referenced in the early modern era are also included. The PRDL is a project of the Junius Institute for Digital Reformation Research.
https://www.nhalliance.org/impact_survey_toolkit
This resource is aimed at helping the humanities community collect data about the impact of programs such as professional development seminars, public humanities projects, and programs for students that prepare them for college and help them imagine humanities careers. These surveys are designed to support the humanities community in articulating the impact of its work and making the case for the resources to support it.
Renaissance Knowledge Network (ReKN)
Provides access to an ongoing, partially crowdsourced environmental scan of early modern studies as it intersects with the digital humanities. This scan takes the form of a comprehensive directory of annotated resources, complemented by an annotated bibliography; both are structured by a ReKN-specific taxonomy.
Marenzio Online Digital Edition (MODE)
The Marenzio Online Digital Edition (MODE) is a critical edition of the secular music of Luca Marenzio (ca. 1553-1599), one of the most influential composers of the European Renaissance.
Manicule is a standalone React/Redux web application for presenting unique printed books and manuscripts in digital facsimile. Built and designed by Liza Daly and Whitney Trettien with support from the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, Manicule allows editors to build guided tours through a book, annotate the edges of interesting pages, categorize and color-code each page in the facsimile, and visualize the book’s structure.
