Dear digital medievalists,
There's a new humanities computing project based at Brown University. Continuing the work of the Decameron Web and other electronic projects relevant to Early Modern Italy, with the Virtual Humanities Lab we plan to develop existing and new digital resources into an experimental model for collaborative scholarship and pedagogy.
We are encoding new texts (Boccaccio's Esposizioni sulla Commedia di Dante and portions of Giovanni Villani's Croniche). We are also beginning work on a new interface, which will provide tools that will allow scholars to annotate texts online, suggest variant encodings, and of course participate in discussion using natural languages as well as code.
We have started a weblog at http://brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/vhl/. Clicking on the "about" link there, and perusing the posts written so far, will tell you more about the project. We enthusiastically invite comments from any interested parties.
The VHL is co-sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and Brown University, with the participation of scholars from Rome and Bologna.