Digital Italy Part 2

On Tuesday, we held the second half of the Digital Italy seminar. Like last time, I wanted to post a links round-up so that people can find these great projects and resources and see how they develop over the coming years.

Luca Rigobianco (Venice) – Building a digital corpus and a computational lexicon of the languages of ancient Italy

Luca demonstrated some of the resources from his current project, ‘Lingue e culture dell’Italia antica: linguistica storica e modelli digitali’, a collaboration between Ca’ Foscari, the University of Florence and the National Research Council of Italy. Comprising a digital corpus of texts (in Faliscan, Oscan, Cisalpine Celtic and Venetic) and a computational lexicon, this project is still in its early stages. The project website is here.

Valentina Mignosa (Oxford)- Crossreads and the digital corpus of inscriptions from ancient Sicily. Researching Elymian texts

Valentina showed us some of her work on Elymian arising from the Crossreads project. Like Luca, she told us a lot about how EpiDoc had been used to encode the epigraphic information, and how the team were dealing with encoding uncertainty in readings and language.

Giuseppe Castellano (Toronto) – Trapezites: An Ancient Currency Conversion Website

After a short break, Giuseppe Castellano took us on a tour of his website Trapezites, which allows users to covert between ancient currencies. He told us a bit about the challenges of this kind of work, and what changes he was planning to make to the design in future. Giuseppe is keen to hear from users, particularly those using the site in teaching.

Francesca D’Andrea and Gianfranco Adornato (Pisa) – The City’s Shape. Making a Verbo-visual Lexicon of the Ancient Rome

Francesca told us more about her project to map literary texts, buildings and works of art in the city of Rome, using GIS to place evidence in space. She has started with Pliny the elder and his contemporaries, and hopes to work over a large chronological spread of authors and objects. Her academia.edu page has more information on her publications.

I’d like to thank all our speakers and participants again for two great afternoons of discussion! Although this event was online-only, I’m hoping that we’ll all see each other in person before too long.