Oregon Petrarch Open Book

Our goal for the "Oregon Petrarch Open Book," or "OPOB," is to enhance a scholarly database-driven website around Francis Petrarch's fourteenth-century poetry collection, the Canzoniere. Using open source software we intend to build a more flexible and comprehensive structure for our current digital assets and strengthen the groundwork for international collaboration among scholars and institutions around this central work of world literature. In the current iteration of OPOB, a scholar is able to read a poem in the original, examine a Renaissance commentary, compare a series of different translations, analyze contemporary rewritings, and finally, explore multimedia assets associated with the poem. For the tenure of this grant we plan to enhance the functionality of existing software, such as the Compare Tool, by providing multiple moveable containers of selectable content, text, images, audio or video

Il profondo e l’espressione. filosofia, psichiatria e sicanalisi di Carlo Sini

No Abstrac

Worlds of Meaning

Welcome to the fifth issue of Humanist Studies &the Digital Age entitled Networks and Projects: New Platforms in Digital Humanities. The sections Perspectives and Interventions are devoted to the publication of a selection from the proceedings of a colloquium held at Brown University in the Spring of 2015. These first two sections are presented and introduced by Massimo Riva in his essay on Scholarly Networks and Collaborative Practices. The third section of this issue, Projects, is presented by Crystal Hall in her introduction, Italian Studies and Digital Humanities: Research Outcomes. In the brief notes of my Editorial, I reflect on the idea of “network” as conceptual framework and privileged space of knowledge engaging with Pierre Lévy’s work, and I anticipate the topic of the sixth issue of this journal that will be published in 2019

Return to Philology and Hypertext in and around Petrarch’s Rvf

This article examines the theoretical premises and consequences of the renewed attention to the intersection between philology, hermeneutics, and criticism in humanist studies in general and in Petrarch studies in particular. The most recent philological achievements–from the new facsimile of Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: Codex Vat. Lat. 3195 (Rvf), edited by Belloni, Brugnolo, Storey, and Zamponi to the new critical edition of Petrarch’s masterpiece by Giuseppe Savoca–are presented and discussed as introduction to reflections on the role that a hypertext project, such as the Oregon Petrarch Open Book initiated at the University of Oregon, may play in the return to philology as necessary tool of textual criticism and hermeneutics

The Blind Spot of the Future

When I proposed having the future at the center of this issue, which marks the 10th anniversary of Humanist Studies & The Digital Age, I was aware of the complexity of this controversial topic. The possibility of magnifiche sorti e progressive — a “splendid and progressive destiny” — made possible by human technology inspires hope in some and critique in others. The expression comes from one of Leopardi’s last poems, Ginestra o il fiore del deserto (Broom, or the flower of the desert), where he uses it ironically to suggest the powerlessnesss of humanity in the face of natural disasters. The poet argues with all those who praise the human condition and progress acritically. He condemns their hubris and bitterly invites them to visit the arid slopes of Vesuvius, reduced to a desert by the volcano’s eruption

Sardinia: the “Greatest Poem” and its Maritime Face

The Mediterranean Sea contributes to the vital rediscovery of meaning advocated by Giambattista Vico’s poetic geography and Sardinian writers search for roots by interjecting a sense of movement in the otherwise immobile Sardinian landscape. First, we see this feature at work in Grazia Deledda’s Cosima and Salvatore Satta’s Il giorno del giudizio. In their novels the movement of the landscape still concretizes in what Deleuze and Guattari call “faciality” (visageité). This characteristic tends to vanish in the writers of the younger generations. In Alberto Capitta’s Creaturine, Giulia Clarkson’s La città d’acqua and Marcello Fois’s Nel tempo di mezzo the “faciality” of the landscape tends to disappear, wrecked by violent history or submerged in a sort of Heraclitean flow of things. Finally, in Giulio Angioni’s Il mare intorno the sea recovers its double and contradictory nature of agent of both isolation and communication.El mar Mediterráneo contribuye al vital redescubrimiento del significado que promueve la geografía poética de Giambattista Vico y escritores de Sardinia buscan las raíces de los incorporarando una sensación de movimiento en el paisaje de Sardinia, de otra manera, inmóvil. Primero, vemos este aspecto en funcionamiento en Cosima de Grazia Deledda y Il giorno del giudizio de Salvatore Satta. En sus novelas, el movimiento del paisaje todavía condensa lo que Deleuze y Guattari llaman “facialidad” (visageité). Esta característica tiende a desvanecerse en los escritores de generaciones más jóvenes. En Creaturine de Alberto Capitta, La città d’acqua de Giulia Clarkson y Nel tempo di mezzo de Marcello Fois, la “facialidad” del paisaje tiende a desaparecer, destrozado por una historia violenta o sumergida en una especia de flujo heraclitáneo de las cosas. Finalmente, en Il mare intorno de Guilo Angioni, el mar recobra su naturaleza contradictoria y doble de agente de aislamiento así como de comunicación

Time of the End? More-Than-Human Humanism and Artificial Intelligence

The first part (“Is there a future?”), discusses the idea of the future in the context of Carl Schmitt’s vision for the spatial revolutions of modernity, and then the idea of Anthropocene, as a synonym for an environmental crisis endangering the very survival of humankind. From this point of view, the conquest of space and the colonization of Mars at the center of futuristic and technocratic visions appear to be an attempt to escape from human responsibilities on Earth. The second part (“AI and other hyperobjects”) discusses the extent of intellectual hubris expressed in computation, AI (Garvin Minsky e Ray Kurzweil), and the philosophy of computing and information (Eric Fredkin), involved in the elaboration of new theoretical assessments on the ultimate nature of reality. Their vision is then contrasted and made to interact with that of philosopher Timothy Morton. He has taken the perspective of global warming and the possibility of ecological catastrophe seriously, avoiding all the futuristic enthusiasms and instead emphasizing the radical nature of the transformations that humans experience in the present. In this perspective, AI becomes one of the “hyperobjects,” like the Internet or climate change, in which humans are immersed. Morton’s hyperobjects delineate an uncanny view of the future; this uncanniness is not related to the supernatural but to the environment. The third section (“More-than-human-humanism”) further reflects on the “uncanniness” that human perceive in the encounters with the manifestations of hyperobjects. It also seeks to understand the human position in the face of the radical technological transformations induced by cybernetics and AI. This section discusses Anti-humanism, Transhumanism, and Posthumanism within the broader category of more-than-human thought, which seems to be a more appropriate term to clarify the possible misunderstandings induced by the word “posthuman” and “transhuman.” The central question is not to empower (Transhumanism) or disempower (Posthumanism) humans, but to see them in relation to what is not human, including other animals, the environment, and the machine. The analysis considers the works of Cary Wolfe, Jane Bennet, Bryant Levi, among others, and introduces ethical debates on cyborgs, robots, and Autonomous weapons systems (AWS). The fourth section (“Ethical Perspectives”) continues this inquiry, concentrating on the non-standard ethical theories of Luciano Floridi (Computer and Information Ethics) and David Gunkel (The question of the Machine). It examines the opportunity and feasibility of including in the discussion on the ethics of our time - characterized by the pervasiveness of AI - the notions of consciousness as theorized by Emmanuel Levinas’s Humanism of the Other and Paul Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another. Finally, the last section (“The time of the end?”) reflects on how the hyperobject, Anthropocene, re-establishes a sense of limits in human history and confirms the special responsibility of human beings, and supports the need for a more-than-human-humanism. The latter, in other words, means intertwining ourselves with a unique ecosystem which cannot be overlooked and which restores meaning to our relationship with the past, present, and future. The awareness of the current challenges of technology can and must express itself in different forms of resistance to the adverse effects of AI in our lives. The ethical approach based on the persisting role of human consciousness is essential, but it must be coupled with human decision-making and political action

Contemporary to the Future: the Classics and Digital Humanism

Welcome to the third issue of Humanist Studies & the Digital Age. It continues the discourse started with publication of the papers presented at the symposium “The Mobile Text: Studying Literature in the Digital Age” held in Rome in 2012. The current issue includes a few essays from another symposium on “Textualities in the Digital Age” held at the University of Oregon in April 2012; Art Farley summarizes the issues and papers presented in this latter symposium in the introduction that follows this editorial

Humanism in the Digital Age

Welcome to Humanist Studies & the Digital Age

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