Text Technologies Workshop with Benedetta Bessi on Mapping the Aegean

Date
Thu April 1st 2021, 11:00am - 12:30pm
Event Sponsor
Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA)
Location
Zoom
Text Technologies Workshop with Benedetta Bessi on Mapping the Aegean

Text Technologies at CESTA announces the next event in the Text Technologies Workshop Series:

"Mapping the Aegean: the Liber Insularum by Cristoforo Buondelmonti. Challenges and Solutions for a Digital Edition"Featuring Dr. Benedetta Bessiwith the support of Dr. Daniele Fusi

MapAeg is aimed at the study and the promotion of knowledge of the Liber Insularum Archipelagi (1420) by the Florentine traveler Cristoforo Buondelmonti. This book can be considered the first guide to the Greek islands, each of them described by a textual paragraph and illustrated by colour maps, in a format which gave rise to the new literary genre of Isolaria. The goal of the project is the creation of a digital edition of this text based on the ms Gennadios Library, Athens, 71, a manuscript presenting the full Latin text illustrated with good quality illustrations of all the islands. The edition includes a facsimile, transcription and an English translation and is accompanied by a commentary which addresses geographical, historical and archaeological questions. An important component is represented by the annotations of the map drawings and their connection to GIS. Given the intrinsic, highly multi-disciplinary nature of this work, and the potential for its growth well beyond its original boundaries, we need a technological approach which, way beyond a text-based digital edition, best ensures the possibility of stacking more and more layers of specialized information about the edited text, at any time during or even after the project completion. This will allow starting with an essential set of metadata, and progressively increase and specialize it with eventual contributions from different scholars. 

About the Speakers:Benedetta Bessi is a Classical archaeologist (PhD, Greek and  Roman Archaeology and History of Art from the University of Messina) interested in the cultural history of the ancient Mediterranean, history of archaeology and digital humanities. She is a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow of Stanford’s Department of Classics and a European Community Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow.Daniele Fusi is currently a research fellow in digital text at the Venice Center of Digital and Public Humanities of the Ca 'Foscari University of Venice. After his doctorate in Greek and Latin philology, he conducted teaching and research activities in the field of digital humanities, especially at the University of Rome Sapienza. As a full-stack professional developer he carried out a decades-long consultancy activity in design and development of software and corpora, especially for academic institutions and publishing houses.

Text Technologies is a core research group at the Center for Spatial & Textual Analysis (CESTA).