An online environment where scholars can train themselves in a set of new practices made possible (and necessary) by digital media and electronic textuality, while at the same time pursuing the traditional goals of their research, in a collaborative fashion.
In its current format, the VHL provides a platform for the development of a mini-corpus of model-texts: Giovanni Villani, Nuova Cronica; Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron and Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante; and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Conclusiones Nongentae Disputandae.
These specific sources were chosen not only because they are the object of ongoing research, (e.g. dissertations, translations or editions) by core and external collaborators: they were also selected because in their diverse typology - historical chronicle, narrative text, literary commentary, philosophical treatise - they pose specific descriptive and interpretive challenges to editors, annotators and encoders.
The VHL environment is conceived as both an editing house and a seminar room. The two primary functions being integrated into VHL are: collaborative and interactive annotation and semantic encoding and indexing.
Some starting points are in the Help menu above; please browse at your leisure. We are actively looking for collaborators – see the About & Guidelines section and the FAQ for details.
KNOWN ISSUES
Thanks to feedback from some of our betatesters (particularly Geoffrey Rockwell), we are compiling a list of known issues/bugs with the site. Most of these have to do with site usability, display of metadata and the annotation process; index verification is not much affected by them.