Noisemakers! Putting the Analog in Digital Humanities

Noisefest! is an interactive, multisensory experience centered around a small Maine town and rooted in the sounds and noise of its streets. Comprising a Virtual Reality tour, soundwalks and remixes, a 2D laser cut geographical map with Arduino controllers, and a Futuristic noise intoner, one of the objectives of this collaborative, transdisciplinary, and theory-based project is to create concrete opportunities for students to participate in the “real” world and engage with the materiality of noise and its manifestations by interacting with the soundscape through novel, interactive, and multisensory practices. Noisefest! is also an example of how one can creatively and artistically extend the reach of the digital humanities beyond the borders of academia and into the public realm.

The Origins of Humanities Computing and the Digital Humanities Turn

At its beginnings Humanities Computing was characterized by a primary interest in methodological issues and their epistemological background. Subsequently, Humanities Computing practice has been prevailingly driven by technological developments and the main concern has shifted from content processing to the representation in digital form of documentary sources. The Digital Humanities turn has brought more to the fore artistic and literary practice in direct digital form, as opposed to a supposedly commonplace application of computational methods to scholarly research. As an example of a way back to the original motivations of applied computation in the humanities, a formal model of the interpretive process is here proposed, whose implementation may be contrived through the application of data processing procedures typical of the so called artificial adaptive systems.

Collective Intelligence, the Future of Internet and the IEML: Interview to Pierre Lévy by Art Farley and Massimo Lollini

Collective Intelligence, the book in French, that Pierre Levy wrote before the existence of the worldwide web, when only the Internet existed, it's a philosophical vision of the future, a philosophical vision of what could be a global civilization based on the digital and the general interconnection of all the computers. In the interview, Levy addresses the creation o the WWW by Tim Berners Lee as a form of collective intelligence. He then discusses Berners Lee's proposal for a reform of the WWW to avoid its confiscation by the big platforms, such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Then, he introduces his most recent project the IELM as a tool for semantic metadata and a code between the natural languages and the algorithms, and all the apparatus of computations.

Pierre Lévy and the Future of Internet

Semantic Metadata, Humanist Computing and Digital Humanities, opens with an important interview with Pierre Lévy that reconstructs the key moments of his philosophical vision of the internet, and the World Wide Web, up to his most recent and highly innovative proposal of the Information Economy MetaLanguage (IEML). In the “Interventions” section our journal features an important reflection by Dino Buzzetti on the distinction between Humanities Computing and Digital Humanities. The essay, originally published in Italian, critically supports the rationales behind Humanities Computing, characterized by a primary interest in methodological issues and their epistemological background. Buzzetti reconstructs accurately the history of this idea starting from the seminal works of scholars like Jean- Claude Gardin, who underlined the need for an awareness that computation applied to the humanities requires both representation (data structures), and information processing (algorithms). The three projects that are introduced in the third part of the journal respond differently to the theoretical solicitations presented in the first two sections. Following the categories of Pierre Lévy, we should say that, even if in a different way, all three projects are the product of a collective intelligence and at the same time contribute to expand the knowledge of a physical territory (in the case of Noisemakers! and of The Dialogues Bioregional Project) or of a literary tradition (in the case of #LauraSpeaks), making the process of their digital processing transparent.

#LauraSpeaks: Remediations of Pellegra Bongiovanni’s “Risposte”

This paper examines the implications of digital remediation which translates and transforms an older text, endowing it with new life, in relation to the project #LauraSpeaks, a translation and remediation of Pellegra Bongiovanni’s Risposte di Madonna Laura alle rime di Messer Francesco Petrarca, in nome della medesima. Divided into three different sections, it describes the steps involved in this project, from the discovery of the original text and the analysis of Bongiovanni’s contribution within the realm of Petrarchism, moving to a discussion of the translation of her work from Italian to English and the creation of the “Twitterature” version of the text, then finally to an analysis of the text’s transformation into the film medium. This paper also investigates the theoretical premises of digital remediation and the role that hypertext plays in multiplying opportunities for meaning-making and in enriching the act of reading and writing.

The Dialogues Bioregional Project: Landscape Ecology in Central Italy from the Sixth Century to the Present

Pope Gregory I (r. 590-604), commonly known as Saint Gregory the Great, is celebrated for re-organizing both the institutional and liturgical life of the Roman Catholic Church; for instigating the first recorded large-scale mission from Rome to England; and for his writings. Among these, a distinct importance has been attributed to his “Dialogues,” a collection of four books of miracles, signs, wonders, and healings carried out by then little-known holy men, which represent a portion of central Italy as a sacred space where the Christian God is present in both human and non-human form, while also interacting with the environment by performing landscaping functions. This article outlines the “Dialogues Bioregional Project,” a digital, interdisciplinary interface on Italian landscape ecology which would promote dialogues between scientists and humanists as well as provide a modeling tool for environmental and cultural awareness. Shaped around the “Dialogues” of Pope Gregory I, this digital humanities project explores continuities and discontinuities between the socio-political and ecological history of a specific section of Italian territory, a set of multidisciplinary environmental narratives (from c. 600 AD to the present), and local communities. My aim is to introduce readers to the ecological potentials of Gregory’s book and thus prompt scholars interested in the environmental humanities and the integration of biophysical and analytical approaches with humanistic and holistic perspectives to become part of the “Dialogues Bioregional Project” and collaborate in its further development.