This page is dedicated to some of the digital projects based in the Department of Humanities. By clicking on the respective logos, you can access the sites and resources that are the result of the work of the DSU scholarly community and the research centres with which there are collaborations
(see Partnerships).
ASH Project
Archaeological investigation of Soil Heritage: the case of Andosols. An integrated and open IT approach to investigate a crucial agricultural resource in Central-Southern Italy (Latium, Campania, Calabria and Sicily) through archaeology, pedology, archaeobotany and remote sensing Project
ASH project, led by Prof. M. Pacciarelli, will examine the role of volcanic ash soils within four case-studies, located in central and southern Italy, investigating their capability to support the spreading and the development of ancient settlement systems and their agricultural-based economy from Prehistory to the Medieval Age. As highlighted for the Poro highplain (Calabria), in each case study area the link between the volcanic soils and the spreading of agriculture will be investigated through pollen cores, pedological analyses and archaeological field surveys. Moreover, the project aims to focus the attention on the crucial problem of the degradation of these volcanic soils – due mainly to climatic change, erosion, huge urban expansion – as well as on the relationship between andosols and hydrogeological risk related to their intrinsic pedological properties. ASH aims at developing a new high-impact research strategy, based on archaeological records (new surveys, cores, legacy data), pedological and archaeobotanical studies, remote sensing based on satellite images and NDVI mapping and sampling. All the collected datasets will be implemented in a web-based IT infrastructure for collecting, modelling, visualizing and understanding agricultural landscapes’ resilience, with a FAIR data policy and organization. In two years, we will provide the basis for further research on the landscape archaeology of Italy, but also for the planning of transdisciplinary projects linking together archaeology, pedology, urban planning and environmental research. ASH will contribute to the knowledge of past human societies, mainly on their relationship with natural subsistence resources. Furthermore, the collected geodata will contribute to a conscious management of soil and landscape heritage, in order to avoid the destruction of this primary natural resource, fundamental for human subsistence in both ancient and contemporary times.
Beyond the visible
For the study of Francesco De Mura’s execution techniques: multispectral investigations and documentary research
The Project is funded by DSU, led by Professor Paola D’Alconzo and carried out in collaboration with the Pio Monte della Misericordia and the University of Campania ‘Luigi Vanvitelli’. The project concerns forty paintings on canvas by Francesco De Mura (1696-1782) preserved in the Quadreria of the Pio Monte della Misericordia, as residual part of the considerable legacy that the painter left to the confraternity. This is a nucleus of works that finds no comparison in any other museum in the world and allows us to observe De Mura’s stylistic evolution from his beginnings to his maturity. The consistency of this collection, which the painter kept with him until his death, together with the variety of subjects and formats, offers the rare possibility of conducting careful research – never carried out until now – about the technical characteristics of these works, thanks to the most up-to-date diagnostic methods of multispectral imaging (macro and raking light photography, UV fluorescence, IR b/w, IR false color, Infrared Reflectography) and non-destructive analytical methodologies (XRF spectrophotometry), to draw a profile of the constituent materials and compositional processes adopted by the painter, thanks to a very large sampling: from small private devotional paintings, to larger format canvases, up to sketches/models related to large altarpieces or wall paintings (some of which are now lost).
CoDA
Commenti Danteschi Antichi
The CoDA project (Commenti Danteschi Antichi) proposes the development of an integrated digital environment, freely searchable online, dedicated to the ancient exegesis of Dante’s Commedia. The project envisages the establishment of the first digital database of Dante’s commentaries in vernacular and Latin, datable by the end of the 15th century, which capitalizes on the one hand on the fundamental editorial season of the Censimento e Edizione Nazionale dei Commenti Danteschi, and on the other hand on the philological and IT experience of the CNR-Opera del Vocabolario Italiano, which with its tools, the Corpus OVI and TLIO, promotes research on ancient Italian in the context of the Digital Humanities. The project involves: 1) the elaboration of the Bibliography of Dante’s commentaries that can be consulted online using the PLUTO software; 2) the creation of the corpus and its integration into the OVI corpus; the lemmatization of the texts and the elaboration of the query system according to the parameters of the GATTO 3.3 and GattoWeb software already widely in use for all the OVI corpora; 4) the extension of the software to querying aimed at research of exegetical interest, related to the explanation of Dante’s dictation and the different contents of the commentaries. The purpose of the corpus is double: lexicographic and hermeneutic. The first goal concerns the study of the lexicon of the commentaries, which contributes to the enrichment of the linguistic profile of Early Italy and the picture of the relationship between Latin and vernacular in expository and argumentative writings. The second objective is to encourage comparative analysis of the commentaries with respect to exegetical perspectives on the poem and the broader cultural content that the texts return.
DAIM
The forms of the museum: pilot project for a Digital Atlas of Italian Museums
The project is funded by PRIN 2022 and is led by Professor Paola D’Alconzo, as PI and coordinator of the research unit of University of Naples; the other research units are at the Universities of Pisa, Roma Tre and Udine. The project originates from the observation that the museum, an organism in constant transformation according to cultural and social contexts, has increasingly focused on communicating its contents, rather than explaining its history and highlighting its syntax and stratifications, reading the museum organism as a whole. Especially at the level of dissemination, in spite of new modalities of fruition and public engagement, has often been left in the shade the meaning of the museum as the result of cultural, institutional, economic processes, resulting in different elements (collections, environments, layouts, arrangements, modalities of visit and fruition) that have gradually integrated to constitute the ‘forms’ of museums. Even in the recent decisive shift to digital and social media, as well as in the projects planned in view of the digital transition envisaged by the PNRR, communication has been declined mainly as a presentation of individual works. In a scenario already oriented towards a revision of the role of the museum (ICOM General Conference 2019), the Project therefore intends to reconstruct and make available to the public a visual history of Italian museums, thanks to the creation of a Digital Atlas of Italian Museums (DAIM), a digital archive of visual documents available in open access, at the service of a broad spectrum of user research and functional to the development of virtual exhibitions, easy to manage and adoptable by museums even without expert technical staff; the DAIM will also allow the production of material and digital prototypes for the narration of museum history, to be used in situ and remotely.
DSWLab
Laboratorio dei documenti nel Web (DSWLab)
The Laboratory of Documents on the Web is currently funded through two grants dedicated to agreements, conventions, and exchanges with foreign universities and research institutes of the University of Naples Federico II. The Laboratory has evolved from the expertise gained through two large-scale European projects, for which Antonella Ambrosio served as the scientific coordinator for the Department of Humanities (DSU): ENArC – European Network on Archival Cooperation (2010-2015), funded by the European Union’s Culture Programme 2007-2013; co:op – community as opportunity. The creative archives’ and users’ network (2014-2018), funded by Creative Europe 2014-2020. Under the coordination of Antonella Ambrosio, the Laboratory aims to: support university teaching, offering training and professional development opportunities on the relationship between historical sources and Digital Humanities, and Paleography and Diplomatics, also through curricular internships for students from various degree programs; develop digital editions and online representations of archival and parchment collections, with a particular focus on medieval and early modern documents, contributing to the Monasterium Project (Monasterium.net); create “Topotheques”, georeferenced online collections of photographs, videos, and documents, through the Topotheque platform (topotheque.com), in line with crowdsourcing strategies and public engagement for Third Mission activities; map data and information from medieval and early modern historical documents in GIS environments, in collaboration with the Museum of Agricultural Sciences (MUSA) at the University of Naples Federico II and its Cartography Laboratory (Head: Antonello Migliozzi). Within the University, the Laboratory serves as the national reference point for ICARUS (International Centre for Archival Research) (icar-us.eu), an international network of academic and archival institutions spanning Europe and North America (Austria, Croatia, Germany, Italy, Czech Republic, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Hungary, Canada, USA). It collaborates closely with: The Zentrum für Informationsmodellierung at the University of Graz (PI: Georg Vogeler);The ERC Advanced Grant From Digital to Distant Diplomatics (ERC DiDip, n.101019327, 2022-2026), based at UniGraz.
The Laboratory also promotes: interdisciplinary research, involving educational scientists (notably the team led by Flavia Santoianni) and computer scientists, to develop innovative teaching methodologies based on new technologies; organization of international conferences, national workshops, and research meetings, aligned with the project’s scientific objectives.
I_MAP
Mapping Italia Antiqua
The Mapping Italia Antiqua Project (acronym I_MAP) is funded by PRIN 2022, PRIN 2022 PNRR, Dipartimento di Eccellenza and led by Rodolfo Brancato. I_MAP aims to create the Digital Atlas of Ancient Italy, an automated aggregator of Digital Archaeological Objects (DAOs). Archaeological landscapes are complex and layered entities, palimpsests composed of interconnected elements, including their textual and cartographic representations. The project seeks to apply semantic and graphic automatic harvesting tools, combined with AI-driven recognition, to collect, analyze, and visualize DAOs, starting with cartographic representations of ancient Italy and Sicily. Since 2021, in the Archaeological Digital Mapping Lab of the University of Naples, I_MAP has been focused on: 1) digitizing legacy data; 2) semantically annotating Philipp Clüver’s maps of Sicilia Antiqua (1619) and Italia Antiqua (1624); and 3) conducting archaeological surveys in Lazio, Campania, Calabria, and Sicily. I_MAP seeks to expand the traditional boundaries of archaeological mapping by integrating field surveys and remote sensing analysis with AI applications. The project will create a digital Atlas of Ancient Italy, aggregating DAOs in linked and open formats, automatically reflecting the current advances in archaeological research. It will be accessible to a wide audience, from scholars to students. The research question of I_MAP is to explore the evolution of settlement systems from the 1st m. BCE to the 1st millennium CE, combining digital humanities (web ontologies, machine learning, automatic pattern recognition) with topography (GIS technology, 3D surveys, remote and proximal sensing). This approach will provide a refined knowledge on the archaeological landscapes of Italy and Sicily, challenging traditional stereotypes about settlement continuities and discontinuities across millennia.
NDP
Naples Dante Project
Naples Dante Project (NDP) is funded by PRIN 2022, PNRR PE5 Changes and Dipartimento di Eccellenza, and is led by professor Gennaro Ferrante. The project aims to constitute an online aggregator of databases primarily focusing on the manuscript, printed and illustrative tradition of Dante’s Commedia. NDP is developing two main research fields: text and image. As for the text, it will launch eCommedia, an image archive and descriptive catalogue of the whole manuscript tradition of Dante’s poem, which will add to the already existing catalogue of the Illuminated Dante Project (IDP) further datasets of extant manuscripts and on Commedia’s manuscript fragment tradition (Fragments of Commedia-FraC). Furthermore, eCommedia will promote HTR-based transcriptions of the corpus as well as automated collations, in order to achieve a digital recensio of Dante’s masterwork. That will be the preliminary step to a digital scholarly edition of the poem. Beside the earliest manuscript tradition, NDP will provide scholars and users with Dante Critical Texts, an online comparating tool of modern scholarly editions of Commedia from Karl Witte (1862) to Paolo Trovato (2021-). As for the image, NDP will expand its research on ancient Dante iconography by creating IlluDant, an image archive and descriptive catalogue of illuminated manuscripts, printed books and in-series drawings of the Commedia from 14th to 16th century. In the following years, NDP will include in its inquiry also the manuscript tradition of Dante’s minor works (Dante Minor), and will link its images and datasets with those elaborated by the PRIN-funded project CommentiDanteschi (CoDa), in order to create a major online aggregator of Dante textual tradition from Commedia to the ancient commentaries of the poem and to Dante’s minor works.
PLATINUM
Papyri and LAtin Texts: INsights and Approaches
The Project ‘Extending PLATINUM’ is led by M.C. Scappaticcio and aims to provide a digital FAIR output to the research results achieved by the ERC-funded PLATINUM project (‘Papyri and LAtin Texts: INsights and Approaches’, ERC-StG 2014 no. 636983 – P.I.: M.C. Scappaticcio). During its entire lifetime (2015–2022), PLATINUM was aimed and succeed to offer a new, enhanced, multidisciplinary approach to Latin texts on papyrus in a bid to examine their potential and provide new insights into their philological, linguistic, literary, historical (both economic and social) and cultural contribution and value, so as to: (1) supply the scholarly community with an updated corpus and philological reference tool, taking the form of a paper publication in 6 vols, forthcoming with ‘Cambridge University Press’, and being available for databases; (2) afford a new understanding of the textual transmission of Latin classics and seek to assess their impact in various parts of the Roman Empire; (3) make a significant contribution to our knowledge of practices used for learning Latin and for education in the language, especially in the provinces of the Late Antique Roman Empire; (4) produce new research results with regard to linguistic aspects of diachronically marked Latin, particularly in multilingual (and multicultural) contexts; and (5) promote knowledge of Roman ‘micro-history’ (and so of history in general) and culture. The original main aim of the project was to reconstruct the circulation of Latin language and literature and its reflection on Roman society and culture through Latin texts on papyrus. This aim was accomplished, but – more remarkable – the results we got opened new windows in research and made us interrogate on wider matters, as the impact of Rome in the Eastern world and, viceversa, the impact of Eastern (languages, literatures and) cultures on Rome within a multicultural Mediterranean reality. Collecting all the Latin texts on papyrus represented the basis of the new Corpus of Latin Texts on Papyrus (CLTP), the main output of PLATINUM’s research. The 6-vols Corpus of Latin Texts on Papyrus (CLTP) is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press (June 2025). The Project ‘Extending PLATINUM’ will provide a digital interoperable platform of the text-editions provided in the forthcoming CLTP. This will stimulate further researches concerning the impact of Latin papyri on Roman history, language, literature and culture.
RECREATE
REConstructing papyrus scrolls and REcovering Ancient TExts with the aid of a new digital tool
Funded by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, RECREATE aims to foster the recovery of new texts from badly damaged papyri whose condition has led to their neglect by scholars. Far from being worthless, this kind of material can be rich in information, but requires the integrated application of different kinds of expertise and advanced methodologies, which can hugely benefit from purpose-built digital tools. The project is developing Maque-IT, a software tool for the virtual reconstruction of papyrus scrolls. This tool will facilitate, check, and partially automate the work of papyrologists dealing with fragmentary texts. It will be the first tool developed expressly for this purpose and will provide valuable help to scholars, no matter the provenance and character of the fragmented papyrus scrolls with which they work. While its potential scope of application is very broad, this tool was primarily conceived with the specific aim of addressing common issues in the study of carbonized papyri from Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum.
