Author: martina

Diversity, Inclusivity, and Accessibility in Digital Scientific Editions (DIA-DSE) seeks to respond to some of the goals set forth in globally relevant strategic agendas and plans that point to the idea that a knowledge society such as the one in which we live should develop an open model of science. Our project will investigate a traditional field of study in philology, namely editions, in their most recent development: Digital Scholarly Editions (DSE). Now that the number of resources has become considerable, the scope of DSEs as a critical representation of historical documents or texts that follow a digital paradigm raises the following questions: do DSE projects take Diversity, Inclusivity, and Accessibility (= DIA) into account? If yes, how much and how? To provide an answer, we will build a corpus of existing resources and we will attempt to assess their DIA-degree. To test the accessibility of the editions, specific tools will be identified to conduct evaluations. Guidelines provided by the W3C – Web Accessibility Initiative, will be used as basic parameters for testing the design of digital interfaces for use by people with (in)visible disabilities, and new guidelines for applying FAIR principles in editions will be considered (Gengnagel et al. 2022). Diversity as “a function of dissimilarity, which in the human and social realm can manifest itself in many different forms and dimensions” (EADH – Statement for Diversity and Inclusivity) and inclusivity, i.e. “a focus on representing and including people/groups who would otherwise be marginalized” (Martinez et al. 2019) will be assessed by examining other criteria: do DSEs represent marginalized subjectivities, languages, content, and cultures? Do they question and reconstruct a new canon in the digital medium or do they tend to reproduce the existing? After this initial data collection and analysis, a ranking of diverse, inclusive, and accessible resources will be defined. These initial results will be followed by a survey that will be disseminated within the scientific community and users, with the aim of opening discussion, raising awareness and gathering suggestions for the creation of DIA-DSA guidelines, which will be published at the end of the project. Alongside this, awareness will be raised among the community for the creation of accessible, inclusive and diverse resources, providing an example/prototype DIA-DSA resource that can serve as a virtuous model at the end of the PdE. A series of scientific initiatives such as seminars and workshops on building accessible, inclusive and diverse DSE will also be organized.

Group leader: Adele Cipolla 

Internal members:

• Stefano Bazzaco
• Anna Bognolo
• Anna Cappellotto
• Stefano Neri

External members:

• Raffaele Cioffi (Università di Torino) 

Actions: WP 1.3, WP 1.4

References:

Gengnagel (et al.) (2022). Criteria for reviewing the application of FAIR principles in digital scholarly editions. Version 1.1, https://ride.i-d-e.de/fair-criteria-editions/
Martinez (et. al.) (2019). “Refining our conceptions of ‘access’ in digital scholarly editing: Reflections on a qualitative survey on inclusive design and dissemination”, Variants 14, 41-74. https://doi.org/10.4000/variants.1070
Making the Web Accessible. Strategies, standards, and supporting resources to help you make the Web more accessible to people with disabilities https://www.w3.org/WAI/ 
van Mierlo (2022). “The Scholarly Edition as Digital Experience”, Textual Cultures 15, 1, Special Issue: Provocations Toward Creative-Critical Editing (Spring 2022), 117-125, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48687518

Theodoric the Great (454-526), king of the Ostrogoths, was a historical figure that in cultural memory became Theodoric of Verona (Dietrich von Bern), that is one of the most popular epic-heroic legends within the Germanic literature (Haymes 2020; Wisniewski 1986). The association with Verona stems from Theoderic’s bond with the town, where traces of the historical and legendary presence of the Ostrogoths can still be identified. 

This project aims to create an annotated corpus of literary witnesses concerning the legend of Theoderic (Heinzle 1999; Lienert 2008), which starts from the local context and highlights the modes of evolution and sedimentation of this legend within the Germanic literary traditions. 

The figure of Theodoric permeates both Latin and vernacular European cultures in an ambivalent way, as the king is sometimes depicted as a valiant hero and other times as a foolish and heretical king. His popularity across the Alps is evidenced by various texts, such as the Norwegian Saga of Theoderic of Bern and the so-called ‘Theodoric cycle,’ a series of Middle High German works blending historical and legendary elements around the Gothic king’s exploits. 

Within the scope of this project, Germanic Philology intends to connect its studies to the local territory of Verona. Our findings will be disseminated not only through traditional academic channels but also to the local and international public at large via the digital media. By 2026, marking with celebrations and events the 1500 years since King Theodoric’s death, we plan to launch a digital application featuring an interactive thematic itinerary through Theodoric’s historical sites in Verona. This resource will be multilingual and multimedia, with a strong focus on accessibility. 

In collaboration with local institutions and bodies, the project aims to contribute to the development of an inclusive and sustainable tourism, by giving value to lesser-known aspects of local cultural heritage and linking them to the Germanic literary traditions. 

Group leader: Anna Cappellotto (PA)  

Internal members:

• Maria Adele Cipolla (PO)
• Lorenzo Ferroni (Ph.D)
• Martina Pernigotto (student)
• Cassandra Tracogna (student)

Actions: WP 1.3

References:

Haymes, Edward R., & Susann T. Samples. Heroic Legends of the North: An Introduction to the Nibelung and Dietrich Cycles. London and New York: Routledge, 2020. 
Heinzle, Joachim. Einführung in die mittelhochdeutsche Dietrichepik. De-Gruyter-Studienbuch. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1999. 
Lienert, Elisabeth. Dietrich-Testimonien des 6. bis 16. Jahrhunderts. Tübingen: De Gruyter, 2008. 
Wisniewski, Roswitha. Mittelalterliche Dietrichdichtung. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986.   

The project aims to examine the textual practices that have shaped the historical and contemporary transmission, dissemination, and accessibility of/in Chinese literature in new contexts of reception from intra-cultural and intercultural perspectives.  

The research follows three main axes. The first one focuses on the Chinese intra-cultural space and analyses the forms of mediation, genres and textual categories, contexts and agents that have promoted the dissemination and popularisation of knowledge and ancient and pre-modern literary works, favouring their accessibility and comprehensibility in different historical periods. The research will pay particular attention to forms of annotation and glossing, commentary, prosification and translation into simplified or vernacular linguistic registers, rewriting, and adaptation.  

The second axis examines the processes and mechanisms that, since the 20th century, have characterised the dissemination and reception of Chinese literature, focusing on ancient and pre-modern literature (up to 1911) in the Italian publishing and cultural context, in which the Chinese literary tradition still occupies a very marginal position. In this part, the project will pay particular attention to studies in the field of literary historiography, literary hermeneutics, and translation theory and practice – including both direct translations from Chinese and indirect translations from mediating languages. 

The third axis continues the research in the context of indirect translation, investigating the processes and agents that facilitated the transmission of Western literary works into the Chinese literary system, focusing in particular on the first half of the 20th century.  

Group leader: Barbara Bisetto

External members:

• Daniele Beltrame (Università per Stranieri di Perugia, Dipartimento Lingua, letteratura e arti italiane nel mondo) 

Actions: WP1.1; WP 1.3

References:

Assis Rosa Alexandra, Hanna Pięta, Rita Bueno Maria (eds. 2017). Indirect Translation: Theoretical, Methodological and Terminological Issues. Special Issue of Translation Studies. 
Gu Ming Dong (2014). Translating China for Western Readers. Reflective, Critical, and Practical Essays. Albany: SUNY Press. 
Gu Yongxin (2014). 经学文献的衍生和通俗化：以近古时代的传刻为中心 (Derivation and Popularization of Confucian Classics Document. Centred around Circulation and Block Printing in Late Antiquity). 2 Voll. Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe. 
Neves Josélia (2022). “Translation and accessibility. The translation of everyday things”. In Federico Zanettin, Christopher Rundle (eds). The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Methodology. London: Routledge, pp. 441-456. 
Sun Yifeng, Li Dechao (eds) (2023). Transcultural Poetics. Chinese Literature in English Translation. London: Routledge.

In the course of the research carried out as part of the Accessing Ophelia Project coordinated by Dr Emanuel Stelzer, the need emerged to study the character of Cassandra as a depiction of cognitive disability in Shakespeare’s receptions of Troilus and Cressida in a new project that expands its boundaries across narrative, dramatic, and poetic genres in English literature from the Middle Ages to the present days. The quantity and nature of the material found, as well as its complexity, hint at entirely original possibilities for development.  

The Cassandra Project investigates the representation of a particular case of prophetic furor as a cultural form of construction of female otherness on the ancient model of Cassandra, studying its mechanisms of exclusivity/inclusivity pertinent to various cultural discourses and their literary and theatrical re-elaborations. Cassandra is emblematic of femininity wounded by the violence of the divine masculine and who, although at the centre of the social and political life of Troy as a member of the royal family, undergoes a process of marginalisation: neither understood nor believed, she is at once princess and priestess, within and without the community to which she belongs. Her language speaks misunderstood and incomprehensible visions and, in the Aeschylus’ tragedy, is sum of tongues and glossolalia (Heirman 1975, Crippa 1990, Mazzoldi 2001). For Ratcliffe (1995), the inability of others to understand her raises questions of discourse articulation, as well as reception, of rhetoric and hermeneutics, invoking questions of ‘justice’ (73-4). In modern times, her otherness was identified as a psychological syndrome by Gaston Bachelard (1949), and was later studied, among others, by Melanie Klein (1963). The model referred to Cassandra identifies a constellation of emotional dysfunctions rubricated as typically female and referable to disorders such as hysteria (Layton Schapira 1988) and autism (Yergeau 2020).  

The project aims to explore the appropriation and reinterpretation of this feminine model in a selection of literary texts in the English language, from the earliest medieval attestations (Geoffrey Chaucer and Robert Henryson) and sixteenth-century Senecan translations to seventeenth-century receptions, including Richard Barnfield’s Cassandra (1595) and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1602?; printed 1609). It will then go on to analyse examples of ‘modern Cassandras’ in the following centuries, with a particular focus on the Victorian period, up to the present day, examining a large corpus of texts including, significantly, female rewrites such as Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Fire Brand (1987), Barbara Wood’s The Prophetess (1996), and more recently Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (2018) and Sharma Shields’ The Cassandra (2019) (cf. corpus). The research will also look at representations of Cassandras on stage, with a focus on Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (2005) and modern English representations of ancient Cassandras (see for example Macintosh et al. 2018). The research, although focused on a corpus of texts and performances in English, situates itself within a broader framework that requires a transdisciplinary and comparative approach.
Starting from the study of the irrational and prophetic furor in the ancient world with attention paid to the specific case of female furor and the Cassandra figure in its various ancient articulations (e.g. Dodds 1951; Guidorizzi 2009; Pillinger 2019), we will explore its receptions in the (early) modern, modern, and contemporary ages, with a particular focus on the construction of a psychological, and more specifically psychiatric, female model and the dialogical relationship this has with literary texts and theatre. Our approach is mainly comparative and encompasses Reception stances, including Translation, Adaptation, and Performance studies, Disability Studies, as well as Feminist and more broadly Cultural Studies.

Group leader: Silvia Bigliazzi  

Internal members:

• Petra Bjelica  
• Elisa Destro
• Valdo Jelcic 
• Cristiano Ragni  
• Beatrice Righetti  
• Isolde Schiffermuller 
• Emanuel Stelzer  
• Roberta Zanoni

External members:

• Anton Bierl (University of Basel)
• Francesca Cichetti (Università dell’Aquila) 
• Francesco Dall’Olio (independent scholar) 
• Giovanna Di Martino (University College London) 
• Amanda Douge (Glasgow University)
• Marco Duranti (independent scholar)  
• Alessandro Grilli (Università di Pisa) 
• Sotera Fornaro (Università della Campania – Vanvitelli) 
• Isabel Karremann (University of Zurich)  
• Chiara Lombardi (Università di Torino) 
• Justine McConnell (King’s College London) 
• Francesco Morosi (Università di Udine) 
• Anne Morvan (Nantes Université) 
• Emily Pillinger (King’s College London) 
• Eugenio Refini (New York University) 
• Anne Sophie Refskou (Aarhus University, Denmark)
• Elena Rossi Linguanti (Università di Pisa) 
• Olga Taxidou (Edinburgh University and NYU) 
• Sarantis Thanopulos (Società di psicolanalisi Italiana)
• Elena Theodorakopoulos (University of Birmingham)  
• Raffaella Viccei (Università Cattolica di Brescia)  
• Amelia Wyckoff  (Brown University)
• Antonio Ziosi (Università di Bologna)

Actions: WP 1.1 

References:

Bachelard, Gaston. 1949. Le Rationalisme appliqué. Paris: PUF.  
Crippa, Sabina. 1990. “Glossolalia. Il linguaggio di Cassandra”. Studi italiani di linguistica teorica applicata 19 (3): 487-508.  
Doherty, Lillian, 2002. Gender and the Interpretation of Classical Myth. London: Duckworth.  
Dodds, E.R. 1951. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley: The University of California Press.  
Hardwick, Lorna, and Harrison, Stephen J., eds. 2013. Classics in the Modern World: A ‘Democratic Turn’? Oxford: Oxford University Press.  
Hardwick, Lorna, and Stray, Christopher. 2008. A Companion to Classical Receptions. Oxford: Blackwell.   
Harrison, Stephen J., ed. 2009. Living Classics: Greece and Rome in Contemporary Poetry in English. Oxford: Oxford. University Press.  
Heirman, L.J. 1975. “Kassandra’s glossolalia”. Mnemosyne 28 (3): 257-67.  
Guidorizzi, Giulio. 2009. Ai confine dell’anima. Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore.  
Yergeau, Melanie. 2020. “Cassandra Isn’t Doing the Robot: on Risky Rhetorics and Contagious Autism”. Rhetoric Society Quarterly 50 (3): 2012-21.  
Klein, Melanie. 1963. “Some Reflections on The Oresteia”. In Klein, Melanie. Envy and Gratitude. And Other Works, 1946-1963, 275-299. London: Vintage.    
Layton Schapira, Laurie. 1988. The Cassandra Complex. Living with Disbelief: a Modern Perspective on Hysteria. Toronto: Inner City Books.  
Macintosh, Fiona, Justine McConnell, Stephen Harrison, and Claire Kenward, eds. 2018. Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.   
Macintosh, Fiona, Pantelis Michelakis, Edith Hall, and Oliver Taplin, eds. 2005. Agamemnon in Performance 458 BC to ad 2004. Oxford: Oxford University Press.   
Martindale, Charles, and Richard F. Thomas. 2006. Classics and the Use of Reception. Oxford: Blackwell.  
Mazzoldi, Sabina. 2001. Cassandra, la vergine e l’indovina. Identità di un personaggio da Omero all’Ellenismo. Pisa – Roma: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazionali.  
Pillinger, Emily. 2019. Cassandra and the Poetics of Prophecy in Greek and Latin Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  
Ratcliffe, Krista. 1995. “Listening to Cassandra: A Materialist-Feminist Exposé of the Necessary Relations between Rhetoric and Hermeneutics.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 28 (2): 63–77.  
Shakespeare, William. 2005. Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare in production series). Edited by Frances A. Shirley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  
Theodorakopoulos, Elena ed. 2012. Translation, Transgression, Transformation: Contemporary Women Authors and Classical Reception, special issue of Classical Receptions Journal 4 (2).

The project endeavours to contribute to research and practice that increase our capacity for literature’s more conscious application to mitigating social challenges and promoting social inclusion. It aims to add a further perspective to understanding if and how literary reading can support disadvantaged sectors of society, leading to improved life satisfaction and wellbeing, and ultimately reducing health and happiness inequalities. Research shows that wellbeing is influenced by various interconnected factors, including those often dictated by our choices, such as education, employment, housing, and health. Our relationships and the media, our augmented environment, have a big impact on our identity, beliefs and attitudes – and hence such life choices. Since media industries often propel insecurity, social division, consumerism and addictive behaviours and one’s environment may imbed limiting beliefs and conformism, mitigating such disempowering influences is a critical step. 

Empirical studies are exploring health, wellbeing and psychological effects of literature and show that literary reading can stimulate modifications in worldview, mentalising ability (Theory of Mind) and self-understanding, helping create an openness to self-alteration and personality trait modification. This may suggest literature’s potential to foster also empowerment which can be defined as an expansion of freedom of choice and action by increasing one’s authority over decisions that affect one’s life. 

The project seeks to arrive at a set of five literary works of prose and five meaningful prose excerpts that may help enhance readers’ perception of disempowering influences in their environment and foster empowerment to help counter their effects. It also aims to develop an interdisciplinary methodological tool to measure for such effects and test it empirically on diverse groups of readers. 

Group leaders: Chiara Battisti and Massimo Salgaro

Internal members:

• Anja Meyer 

External members:

• Krystyna Wieszczek 

Actions: WP 1.1; WP 1.3 

References:

Billington, Josie. 2020. Is Literature Healthy?. Oxford UP. 
Kuiken, Don et al. 2004. ‘Locating Self-Modifying Feelings Within Literary Reading’. In Discourse Processes 38 (2), 267-86.  
Scientific Study of Literature (SSOL) 6 (1). 2016. 
Usherwood, Bob, and Jackie Toyne. 2002. ‘Value and Impact of Reading Imaginative Literature’, Librarianship and Information Science 34 (1). 

The research project connects the critical approaches of disability studies and health humanities and focuses on the narrative, cultural and discursive aspect of the concept of disability. In particular the project will develop along two main lines of investigation:

1. Alzheimer’s and cognitive disability narratives,
2. Dis-abiliy narratives in children’s and young adult’s narratives. 

Alzheimer’s and cognitive disability’s narratives (Chiara Battisti): the proposal aims to investigate whether there are any traces of early manifestations of Alzheimer’s and other cognitive disabilities in authors’ writing, by means of a comparative textual analysis of works written before, and during/after diagnosis. The proposal also aims to determine whether the detected changes in style are consistent with age-related changes or Alzheimer’s symptomatology. Some studies have shown that early manifestations of Alzheimer’s can be detected through changes in an individual’s speech and writing. These changes can include a decrease in vocabulary size, a reduction in grammatical complexity, and a decline in the coherence and clarity of the individual’s writing. 

Dis-ability narratives in children’s and young adult’s narratives (Sidia Fiorato): the project aims at investigating the representation and conception of disability in literary and cultural texts, both from a physical/medical and psychilogical/social perspective, in connection with the articulation of identity of the protagonists and readers. The research will focus on the Victorian period, in relation with the codification of childhood as a distinct life phase and the development of child psychology and psychiatry, and the contemporary period, in particular through the re-reading of fairy tales as a metaphor for the articulation of ableness and dis-abled identities, through the analysis of the protaginists and the communication with young readers. The research will be based on a qualitative research design, specifically, comparative textual analysis, integrated with linguistic and stylometrics tools, cultural and medical theories.  

Group leaders: Chiara Battisti and Sidia Fiorato

Internal members:

• Anja Meyer (assegnista Università di Verona) 

Actions: WP 1.1  

References:

Battisti C. (2018) “Am I Still Alice?”: The Quest for “a Sense of Self” and Alzheimer’s Disease in Still Alice by Lisa Genova” in Susan Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau, The Wounded Hero in Contemporary Fiction. A Paradoxical Quest, Routledge.  
Said, E. (2006) On Late Style, New York: Vintage Book. 
Elizabeth A. Wheeler, “Disability”, in A Companion to Children’s Literature, ed. Karen Coats et al, New York: Blackwell, 2022 
Donna Sayers Adomat, “Exploring Issues of Disability in Children’s Literature Discussions”, Disability Studies Quarterly 34.3 (2014)