Amanda Madden Receives Second Round of NEH Funding to Create a Digital Edition of Goro Dati’s Sfera
Amanda Madden of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), in collaboration with Carrie Beneš of New College of Florida, Laura Ingallinella of the University of Toronto, and independent scholar Laura Morreale, has been awarded a second major grant as part of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Scholarly Editions and Translations program. This grant will allow for a continuation of the scholars’ work on the La Sfera Project, an open-access multimedia edition of Goro Dati’s fifteenth-century poem La sfera (The Globe).
In the project’s prototype phase, funded by the NEH, the team worked on the data models and created a Django-based website beta version that includes the poetic text and its translation, an interactive gazetteer of toponyms, and an inventory of known manuscripts. This support of $99,599 with an $18,000 match will allow the team to complete the data collection, textual analysis (ie., the Italian critical edition), and the spatial analysis of the work, relying chiefly upon information coming from the maps found in many La sfera manuscripts. During the grant period, they will spend the year finalizing the design and infrastructure of the digital edition which is hosted through the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Finally, they will also complete their work collecting textual and cartographic data from approximately one hundred extant fifteenth-century manuscripts, which represents about two-thirds of the extant corpus. Both a teaching and research tool, the project aims to provide a clear idea of complex dynamics of readership and transmission of the La sfera text across the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and serve as a useful case study for scholars and students on the relations between text and image in the premodern world.
In September, the La sfera team will be presenting the data model and the prototype at the Centre for Digital and Public Humanities at Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice, Italy, as well as at the 2024 Spatial Humanities Conference in Bamberg, Germany. They have also received a matching grant from the Mellon Foundation for public outreach work connected to the Sfera Project
ABOUT THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES
Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.
The NEH’s Scholarly Editions and Translations program supports collaborative teams who are editing, annotating, and translating foundational humanities texts that are vital to scholarship but are currently inaccessible or only available in inadequate editions or translations.