Digital Humanities Virtual Hour: Digital Methods for the Curation of Research Fragments

This IHR Digital Humanities Virtual Hour was held on October 2, 2020. Co-sponsored by the IHR Digital Humanities Initiative and the School of International Letters and Cultures (SILC) at ASU, Silvia Stoyanova presented "Digital methods for the curation of research fragments: the case of Giacomo Leopardi's Zibaldone."

This presentation was moderated by Prof. Serena Ferrando. It was introduced by Digital Humanities Initiative Program Lead and IHR Assistant Director Liz Grumbach and was followed by a Q&A.

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Silvia Stoyanova is a literary scholar specializing in modern Italian literature, in particular the works of Giacomo Leopardi. She has conducted research and taught in the USA (Columbia University, Princeton University), Germany (Uni Trier), Italy (University of Macerata) and Austria (Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities). At Princeton, she initiated the creation of a Digital Research Platform for the Zibaldone, Leopardi’s large collection of research fragments. She is exploring how semantic web technologies and knowledge visualization methods could help with the challenges of discourse organization in the scholarly fragment genre, and, conversely, how the design of a digital platform for the study of research notes and their epistemic practices could augment interpretation processes in humanities scholarship.

Serena Ferrando is Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities and Italian. Her research focuses primarily on water and modern/contemporary Italian poetry. Her book in progress, "City of Water. The Poetic Geography of Modern Milan," offers a novel and original ecocritical-cultural narrative of the relationship between poetry and nature in the city of Milan, Italy and three Milanese poets. Prof. Ferrando directs a digital humanities project on Milan’s water canals called Navigli Project. She also studies environmental and experimental noisescapes and offers a course titled “Noisemakers! Tracing the History of Modern Music in Italy” where students build noise instruments and develop multimedia projects that utilize sound mapping to create a multisensory experience of the world. Her publications span across the fields of literature, ecocriticism and digital humanities.