Massimo Riva

Extending the text: digital editions and the hypertextual paradigm

This paper explains some of the theoretical underpinnings informing the framework of the Virtual Humanities Lab [9] at Brown University. We argue that humanists can and should perform research collaboratively online, provided the availability of tools that suit their individual and collective needs. VHLs implementation of some such tools is extendable to treating a variety of primary sources. In its first year of development, VHL enables scholars to participate in the editing and annotation of a diverse typology of semantically encoded texts from Early Modern Italy.

An Emerging Scholarly Form: The Digital Monograph

Two recent initiatives, in the English-speaking world, are currently promoting monograph publishing in digital formats, with a specific focus on the arts and humanities but also including the social sciences. The American initiative is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation; in the U.K., the Arts and Humanities Research Council has also promoted a similar initiative, the Academic Book of the Future, which produced a final report released in Spring 2017. This article describes some of the challenges and opportunities the author and his team are facing in designing a digital monograph on eigteenth and nineteenth-century visual culture, one of two pilot projects of the Brown University library Digital Publishing Initiative, funded by the Mellon foundation.

Mediating the Risorgimento

The papers collected in this issue of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies were presented at an international symposium held at Brown University on 14–15 April 2011 to mark the occasion of the 150th anniversary of united Italy. The topic of the symposium was the role of old and new media (so defined within the framework of their time) in the production and dissemination of an ‘imagined Italian community’ and the articulation of a national discourse, against the backdrop of nineteenth-century Europe. Scholars from Italy, the UK and the USAwere invited to address the question of how different media (illustrated news, opera and theater, painting and photography, panoramas and film) contributed to shaping the social and political relationships and strategies that resulted in Italian unification, gave voice and expression to national narratives and iconographies, provided a bridge between elite and popular culture, and influenced post-unitarian debates. The symposium consisted of four sessions: ‘Risorgimento in Print’, chaired by John Davis (University of Connecticut); ‘Visual Cultures of the Risorgimento’, chaired by Emily Braun (CUNY); ‘Performing the Risorgimento’, chaired by Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg (Brown University); and ‘Cinema and Pre-cinema of the Risorgimento’, chaired by Massimo Riva (Brown). A round-table discussion, ‘Mediating the Risorgimento: Past and Present’, chaired by David Kertzer (Brown) concluded the event. In addition to the present selection of essays, images accompanying some of the papers published here, as well as the abstracts of all the papers that were presented over the two days of the symposium, are accessible through the Garibaldi & the Risorgimento project at Brown University (http://library.brown.edu/cds/ garibaldi/resources/mediating.php). The question at the center of the symposium, the role of media in both the representation and the shaping of historical figures and events, has increasingly attracted the attention of scholars over the past three decades: from the lavishly Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2013 Vol. 18, No. 2, 141–144, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2013.753784

Pico della Mirandola: Oration on the Dignity of Man : Acknowledgments

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463—1494) distinguished himself during his brief career by the precocity of his learning and the boldness of his ideas in philosophy and theology. His motto, De omni re scibili (“Of all things that one can know”), asserted that he knew all there was to be known. Though a doubt is permissible on that score, the claim itself seems to refiect a characteristic attitude of his time in which the borders between confidence and foolhardiness were very ill defined.

Pico della Mirandola: Oration on the Dignity of Man : Contents

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463—1494) distinguished himself during his brief career by the precocity of his learning and the boldness of his ideas in philosophy and theology. His motto, De omni re scibili (“Of all things that one can know”), asserted that he knew all there was to be known. Though a doubt is permissible on that score, the claim itself seems to refiect a characteristic attitude of his time in which the borders between confidence and foolhardiness were very ill defined.

Pico della Mirandola: Oration on the Dignity of Man : A New Translation and Commentary

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463—1494) distinguished himself during his brief career by the precocity of his learning and the boldness of his ideas in philosophy and theology. His motto, De omni re scibili (“Of all things that one can know”), asserted that he knew all there was to be known. Though a doubt is permissible on that score, the claim itself seems to refiect a characteristic attitude of his time in which the borders between confidence and foolhardiness were very ill defined.