Thank you. Good morning and thanks to everybody for coming to this presentation.
The alternative of my presentation today is to introduce the digital millini project that is a joint initiative between the University of Mala in Spain
and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles that I am currently coordinating together my colleague, Murtha Baga, who is the head of the digital art history access at Getty.
So the idea is to address very, very briefly some problematic issues that we have in the development of digital resources for art historical research
and specifically for collaborative and critical analysis of art historical research because it is the focus of this project.
So first of all, let me show you an overview of the project.
Among different purposes that we have, the two main purposes of this project are, first, to explore new methods and tools with which to reinvent the concept of scholarly work
and specifically, as I have already said, collaborative and critical analysis of art historical text where the convergence between text and images, words and images is essential.
So it's something that we have to work on that.
And the second is to explore the real behaviour and research practices of art historians in these kinds of environments.
Here we have another important point to understand this project. Why Melini?
The name is Melini because the project focuses on an unpublished manuscript that belongs to the Getty Research Library, the special collection.
And in this text that was written in 1681 by a Roman nobleman named Pietro Melini, that's the reason of the project,
the author Pietro Melini poetically described what he considered the most excellent paintings belonging to the Melini family collection in the 17th century in Rome.
Of course, this text carries a self-interest for art historical research.
But for us it's important because in this document what we have is a verbal description, a political description of images, mostly of them remain unidentified until now.
So the text, the document gives us the opportunity to deepen the potentialities of the digital media, digital environment to establish this connection between text and images and to explore if we can get some new insights or new heuristic perspective about this connection.
To carry out the critical analysis of the text, that is the focus of the project, the team has developed a computational prototype.
And this computational prototype fits more or less with the idea of the virtual research environment because on the one hand we have several research tools, documents, sources for the production of the knowledge, that in our case is a critical analysis of the text,
but also we have a community of scholars that are participating in the project and interacting on the workspace and of course going out the critical analysis of the text.
The design of the workspace is constructed around the focus of the project, I mean the text and the critical analysis in a collaborative way.
Among the different research tools that we have, I will outline roughly what I consider the most relevant for our work.
Of course we have the text, the manuscript in different versions, we have the diplomatic transcription of the text encoded in TEI, we have the Italo Felsimile, we have the translations into English, into Spanish, and of course with an interface that allows us to make comparisons among different versions.
We have also tools for the critical annotation of the text, so each participating scholar can aggregate critical annotations to the text, to different parts, to different fragments of the text, according to a methodology of action and interaction that has been specifically developed for this project.
And also the annotations can be arranged as a response or replay to other entries, so it is possible to establish dialogue, a critical debate among the scholars that are participating in the project, and also it's easy to follow the threads of the discussion on the workspace.
Other important research tools that we have is a gallery of images. In this gallery of images, what we have is the different images proposed by the scholars as possible identifications of the works of art described by Peter Melini in his poem, and we can compare the different images proposed for that.
But even in my opinion, most important that the gallery of images is the concordance, because the concordance is an interface that brings together the images proposed by the scholar, the poetical description of the works of art that we have in the 1781 inventory, and also the technical description of the same collection that we have in another inventory of the same collection,
writing only one game before in 6080. So for us it's very important because we can compare different verbal approaches to the same works of art because the collection is the same, but also we can notice how the different images proposed by the scholar fits quite well with the poetical description of Peter Melini,
so that means that Peter Melini is recreating in his imagination the works of art according to a general schemas of representation, emotional representation, iconographical representation that are common for the visual culture of the period of time, and that can be reused for different images dealing with similar topics, more or less.
And here we have one of the problematic issues that we have found in this project, to assume the epistemological changes that are implied in this new way of producting knowledge and this new way of working, because the digital Melini offers a multifaceted and plural approach because we have different perspectives, different point of view,
living all together at the same time on the same workspace. So for us this plural multifaceted approach corresponds better with our current understanding of knowledge that is plural, diverse, that is multicultural or even contradictory or paradoxical.
But this circus tongue entails a new problem, how to display all these different perspectives of these different points of view in a clear way on the screen, but without missing the idea that we are in front of a multiple approach to the text.
And also other epistemological change that is implied in this project or in this kind of environment is that now we have an open antinomic knowledge, because as the system has the ability to record the political debate among the scholars, we can reconstruct the intellectual process of the interpretation task.
So the digital product of this kind of workspace and this kind of environment is not only the final conclusions reached by the scholars after a debate or intense debate that many times remain hidden for the rest of the scholar, the intellectual process of the interpretation is also part of this digital product.
But again we have here a new problem or the same problem, how to display in a clear way this intellectual process. Another thing that I would like to point out very briefly is that as you will have noticed this computational prototype is not innovative in technological terms, because we have used very well known open source resources like Drupal,
that is the software that we have used for the development of the project, so it comment that this is a tool for the critical annotation and so on. Because for us the contribution, if this project has some kind of contribution, is that weighing with the information, the tools, the data, the sources are combined and organized to give a specific response to specific necessities and specific problems connected with a
specific task that is a critical analysis of our historical text, because in our mind one of the problems of the digital scholarship is not only the technical issues or the software issues, but is much more connected with how to organize the scholarship, how to arrange the information, how to manage the data.
And I think or we think that with this project we are facing this kind of problems connected with the digital scholarship. Okay, I will skip and I would like to finish with that, because it's another of the problems that we have, how interact in a multilingual context.
For this project the team took the decision to use the English as lingua franca, because it's the easiest solution. But we are aware that it's not the best solution, because what happens with the other languages, with Italian, with Spanish for example, which is the digital representation of these languages in this kind of collaborative and multi-plural environments.
So it's something that we have to think in the next future, how to preserve the linguistic identity of the community of scholars that are participating in this kind of collaborative environment, and also how to preserve the language of the intellectual traditions in this kind of project.