This is the beginning of a FAQ for the Virtual Humanities Lab. Since we're just starting out publicly, and don't have much feedback to go on, perhaps for the moment this should be called “The Questions That (We Anticipate) Will Be Asked Frequently”.

This is not intended to be a thorough overview of the VHL project. For that, please refer to the About page as well as the project description on Brown's Italian Studies website. If you have a question that is not answered here, or any feedback in general, please email us. Your inquiries and help are very much appreciated.

Thanks to Peter Boot (Huygens Instituut, The Netherlands) for contributing to this FAQ.

Basic project philosophy

1. What are VHL's goals?

Concisely: to provide a place online where scholars (broadly defined as people with some expertise in the field(s) at hand who have something to contribute to the literary knowledge base) can collaboratively edit and annotate texts.

We have received specific feedback from our site evaluators as to what functions VHL should serve for the user. We are taking all of the following into account as we redesign the interface and further develop the site:

• quick reference tool for literary researchers and historians
• evolving edition of literary works
• repository for fleeting, useful thoughts that occur during research
• conversation space
• a supplement to recreational reading
• an experiment in community scholarship

If you have additions to this list that you believe will be helpful in our thinking, please send us an email!

2. Why collaboratively? People have produced solid work for centuries, working alone in a candle-lit study!

We are aware that scholars in the humanities are not accustomed to collaboration. At least, not explicitly stated collaboration: conversations over coffee, run-by tidbits in hallways and offices and conference discussions all contribute significantly to individually produced scholarship. Interaction with colleagues, however, does not merely provide valuable bits of information: it energizes and inspires us. We wanted to create a space where people could converse on specific topics without waiting for an annual conference.

3. For all of your talk about the humanities in general, aren't you catering to a pretty narrow field, here?

It is true that the texts we currently have online are written in 14th-century Italian. This in itself already narrows our potential audience at the moment; add to that the (some would argue) specialized nature of the texts, and there's a legitimate concern over our broader claims.

Our vision is indeed more general. VHL's texts, as they currently stand, are an experiment, material with which to test our assumption that this will be of interest, as well as to fix interface bugs. That is the scope of the two-year project co-funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and Brown University. If VHL takes off, we envision expanding it so that the toolset and mode of working we are testing out may be used with other texts, in whatever language.

4. The public nature of this site makes me uneasy. You state that contributions will be linked to my name, but without a lot of research I don't have time for, putting my work out there would be rife with professional consequences if my contributions are overturned, dismissed or otherwise deemed of no value.

We hope that this site will be what it professes to be: a lab, a place where people test out ideas and search for answers together, in an attempt to understand our past and present. Your contribution will be invaluable; making your thoughts available to a large audience of researchers will be more likely to promote this collective quest for knowledge than to bring the wrath of colleagues upon you.

5. Why should I spend my time doing scholarly work that is not considered “serious” work by the important people – job search committees, tenure review committees, etc.?

Consider VHL an early step towards getting this kind of work formally validated. Validation will not happen without a practical demonstration of the usefulness of such work. Researchers in the sciences are rewarded for working in a lab with their colleagues, regardless of whether a particular experiment succeeds or fails. We are trying out a similar model, and fervently hope that you will join us.

Interfacing with VHL

1. VHL's interface doesn't work on my browser! What gives?

VHL does not work with Internet Explorer, because the latter doesn't follow all accepted conventions of website design and display. We apologize for the inconvenience, but we invite you to view VHL with a free, standards-compliant browser such as Firefox/Mozilla. If you have problems using a non-IE browser, please email us ALL of the following information: the nature of the problem; exact error messages, if any; browser (and version number) that you're using; and the operating system installed on your computer.

2. Why can't I see the annotation engine?

Most probably because you do not have an annotator's account on VHL. These are by invitation, but we do not wish to be exclusive of qualified collaborators. For more information, please read the Guidelines for Annotation.

If you already have an account and cannot get to the annotation engine, please log in.

3. Can you walk me through making an annotation?

Sure thing. Please take a look here (PDF).

Concerning the texts and our approach

1. What is the relation between encoding and annotation? Is the basic document structure pre-encoded, and will it be modifiable by participants? Are proposed variant encodings “annotation” or “encoding”? Do any parts of the original encoding (for example, dates, terms, themes) count as annotation?

Before we put up the texts, they were pre-encoded in XML by our researchers: Roberto Bacci worked on the Esposizioni, whereas Cronica Fiorentina was encoded by Matthew Sneider and Rala Diakité. Their encoding includes both basic document structure (book, chapter, paragraph...) and names/dates/terms/themes. What we consider "annotation" is only the free-text commentary written by these and other scholars using the annotation engine. The annotations are stored separately from the text, in an SQL database.

It is our intention to make the encoding visible on request (the blue angle-brackets button in the text view). We also intend to make it possible for scholars to propose other, variant encodings to chunks of text. There's a major technical issue with this: contributors cannot change the encoding itself, or they'll quickly make the document poorly formed and thus unviewable. For the moment, after the encoding itself is made available, we will ask scholars to propose variants in annotations, and store the annotations as above. When someone makes a compelling case for a change in the principal encoding (for example an egregious error on our part), we'll change the XML file from here, with attribution. The technical details of this are yet to be worked out.

2. What is the provenance of the texts VHL is using? How do you handle multiple witnesses, where applicable?

The text of Boccaccio's Decameron, currently available through the VHL interface, is the same text that we used for the Decameron Web project. It is based on Vittore Branca's 1992 edition published by Einaudi (Torino).

The text we're using for the Esposizioni is that of Giorgio Padoan's critical edition (Milano: Mondadori, 1994. First published in: Boccaccio, Giovanni. Tutte le opere, ed. Vittore Branca. Milano: Mondadori, 1965.) An electronic version of the text was generously provided by Pietro Beltrami and the Opera Vocabolario Italiano project.

Villani's Cronica Fiorentina (of which, for the moment, we are only using the 13th book) was also generously supplied by Pietro Beltrami and the OVI. It is the 1990-91 critical edition edited by Giuseppe Porta and published by Fondazione Pietro Bembo/Guanda in Parma, in three volumes.

On Pico's text, the Conclusiones CM project site states: “The text presented here is a transcription of the British Library copy of the editio princeps of Conclusiones CM (Silber, 1486).” For more information on the Pico text, please look here.

3. How exactly could I use the VHL as a research tool?

One way is, of course, basic searching within the texts, both string-based and semantic. The rest depends on the texts themselves. You may use indexes to find references to particular people, no matter how their names are spelled, and in the case of the Esposizioni to look at overarching themes (at least as we've encoded them), and perhaps help us refine the encoding.

You may also wish to participate in annotating and discussing these texts, if you are so inclined. We would, of course, love to have as many participants as possible, and we hope you help make the discussion lively.

4. What are some possible didactic uses of VHL?

We are currently working on another part of the project: the Virtual Seminar Room. Its contents will be similar in scope to the pedagogy module of the Decameron Web.