Digital & Humanities

• In my work as the Thomas A. Edison Papers Postdoctoral Associate, I identify, select, and help implement digital tools that can enhance the usability of the project’s digital book and image editions. To make its metadata more accessible, and better integrate its editions, we use open-access PDF and EPUB3 formats on Project Muse at Johns Hopkins University Press, and an image edition of more than 154,000 documents on an Omeka-S platform. In addition, part of the image edition published originally as microfilm is mounted on the Internet Archive as PDFs of the microfilm reels. My contributions also include exploring tools such as the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), linked open data, data visualizations, manual and automated downloads of its data and metadata, and how we might link to related open-access materials in online repositories. I offer workshops and lectures to the larger DH community at Rutgers (2021-2022)

• As the recipient of the D’Argenio Fellowships in History and Data Visualization, I am working to complete historical research, write an article and create a data visualization based on my historical analysis of the Ron D’Argenio Collection of Coins and Antiquities at Seton Hall University (2021-2022)

• I have been working on a book manuscript from my doctoral dissertation research

• I have been designing and mapping visualizations of Galileo's letters on astronomy, and my findings are forthcoming in a chapter with The University of Chicago Press

• I am developing "Gendered Epidemics" for a digital exhibition and edition of primary sources documenting the 1629-1631 plague in Venice

• Agostini, Caterina. “Dear Galileo: Letters on Astronomy” in El Khatib, Randa and Caroline Winter, eds. The Changing Shape of Digital Early Modern Studies. Toronto and New York: Iter Press (distributed by University of Chicago Press), 2022

• Agostini, Caterina. “Translating Absence and Presence: Pirandello’s ‘La buon’anima’ [‘The Dearly Departed.]” PSA, The Journal of The Pirandello Society of America (2023)

• Agostini, Caterina. "Reading Collections in the Edison Papers." Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities (IDEAH), 2023

• Agostini, Caterina and Paul Israel. “Mediating and Connecting: Versatile Digital Publishing in the Edison Papers.” “Digital Editing & Publishing in the Twenty-First Century.” C21 Editions, ed. James O'Sullivan, 2023

• Agostini, Caterina, Carrie Beneš, Elena Brizio, Laura Ingallinella, Monica Keane, and Laura Morreale. Goro Dati, The Globe (La Sfera), Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2023. This textbook is a translation of commentary in the series TEAMS: Teaching Association for Medieval Studies

• Agostini, Caterina. “Alphabet, Course, and Discourse in Galileo and Calvino” to be submitted to Italian Culture, 2023

• Agostini, Caterina. “Narrating Syphilis in 16th-Century Italy” in a collected volume edited by Giovanni Spani, Quod Manet, 2023

• In press

• Agostini, Caterina. “Dear Galileo: Letters on Astronomy” in El Khatib, Randa and Caroline Winter, eds. The Changing Shape of Digital Early Modern Studies. Toronto and New York: Iter Press (distributed by University of Chicago Press), 2022

Also, exploring call for papers at professional conferences and writing abstracts... 

💬 Keywords: Digital Humanities, History of Science, Galileo, material book history, IIIF

National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute, Mapping the Early Modern World, The Newberry Library, Chicago, IL, Summer 2022

D’Argenio Fellowships in History and Data Visualization, to create a data visualization based on my historical analysis of the Ron D’Argenio Collection of Coins and Antiquities, Seton Hall University, 2021-2022

2021 Rutgers School of Graduate Studies Excellence in Outreach and Service

Eugene Garfield Fellowship, Library & Museum Resident Research Fellow at the American Philosophical Society (APS), Philadelphia, 2020-2021

Stipend for conference registration at the Renaissance Society of America virtual annual meeting 2021, from Iter Gateway to the Middle Ages & Renaissance

Rutgers University Excellence Fellowship, 2016-2017 and 2019-2020

Open Knowledge Practicum Fellowship at the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, Open Knowledge Program, at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, May 2019

Renaissance Society of America DHSI Scholarship covering tuition for Out-of-the-Box Text Analysis for the Digital Humanities, taught by David L. Hoover, and Text Mapping as Modelling, taught by Øyvind Eide, 2019

Translating a text reveals features in the original language and in the target language as well. I agree on this, and have gained valuable experience translating Renaissance and twentieth-century books.

A collaborative translation of Goro Dati’s La Sfera, a fifteenth-century schoolbook on geography, astronomy, and navigation. The illuminated manuscript preserves the text in the Italian vernacular, maps, illustrations, and diagrams (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, Ms-8536), preceded by Ptolemy's Cosmographia (Geography), an influential book and atlas dating back to the second century CE. 

A collaboration with Caterina Agostini (University of Notre Dame), Carrie Beneš (New College of Florida), Elena Brizio (Georgetown University), Laura Ingallinella (Wellesley College), Monica Keane (Independent researcher), and Laura Morreale (Georgetown University).

Contributing three short stories translated in a collection by Luigi Pirandello (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1934)

Featured translator in Pirandello in Translation 

Pirandello, Luigi. “The Dearly Departed” (“La buon’anima”), tr. Caterina Agostini. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2022.

Forthcoming translation of “All for the Best” (Tutto per bene”) and “Without Malice” (“Senza malizia”)

Digital editions benefit from collaboration, as well as multilingual expertise in many disciplines in the humanities. 

WHO: over 80 scholars of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and early modern period, ranging from history and Italian studies, to art history and material book history.

WHAT: Goro Dati, La Sfera, a fifteenth-century geographic treatise in Italian, namely the Florentine vernacular. 

• We transcribed eight manuscripts. 

• We have been translating the text into English for the first time.

• We have been mapping the book locations and comparing them to Renaissance portolan charts, through ArcGIS.

WHEN: May 2020-to date.

WHERE: online, with scholars joining from 10 different time zones! We welcome scholars from all careers, and appreciate the participation of early career researchers and graduate students.

Presentations have been ongoing at the 2021-2022 Renaissance Society of America, The 2021 Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and the 2022 New College Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

WHY: the book did not have an edition drawing on eight manuscripts, a digital edition, or an English translation. So that others may benefit from the work done, the transcriptions, images, and webpages, and other related scholarly products issuing from these challenges have been catalogued in BodoArxiv, and digital projects, hosted by Stanford University, will be forthcoming. 

HOW: through digital resources and tools, such as IIIF images of manuscripts housed at world-class research libraries, FromThePage, and WordPress. 

Communication has been lively on Twitter, by following the hashtags #LaSferaChallenge and #LaSferaChallenge2.

Funding and support for the project from the IIIF Consortium, FromThePage, and Stanford Libraries.

Digital editions make textual and visual contents available to users. Here is a sample selection of my work in those contexts

Building the IIIF Community 

Invited talk, "A Language Case Study: Italian IIIF," at the 2021 IIIF Fall Working Meeting, in the session "How do we reach the right people with IIIF?", 18 November 2021 (video recording on YouTube, 16:23-24:52)

Co-presenter, with Danielle Reay, at a New Jersey Digital Humanities Consortium workshop

Co-founder, with Ben Bakelaar, of a Special Interest Group on IIIF at Rutgers (2020-2021)

Co-author, with Ben Bakelaar, “Introduction to IIIF” (29 June 2021)

Co-author, with Ben Bakelaar, “Special Interest Group on IIIF” (21 June 2021)

PHAROS, The International Consortium of Photo Archives

Scholar Advisory Group member at the pilot project for PHAROS, The International Consortium of Photo Archives, consulting on user interface designs and prototypes for an early modern art collection, 2019-2021

Co-author with Alison Bennett, Isabelle Marchesin, Giulia Martini, Emily Pugh, Alexander Supartono, The PHAROS user interface statement, to help expand the use of photo archives, using them to tell more global, more inclusive histories of art, 2021 

Outcomes: 30-month project (2018-2021), for the creation of a pilot platform, built using ResearchSpace, through which scholars can explore nearly 1.5 million images of works of art and documentation

Collaborators: Caterina Agostini, Alison Bennett, Lukas Klic, Isabelle Marchesin, Giulia Martini, Ellen Prokop, Emily Pugh, Tracy Stuber, Alexander Supartono, Louisa Wood Ruby

Materials: approximately 1.5 million images, including documentation of works of art from the early modern period in a variety of media (drawings, prints, paintings, architecture, sculpture, decorative arts), primarily from Italy, but also Germany, France, the Netherlands, Poland, the Baltic region, Turkey, and Egypt, and accompanying scholarly documentation 

Repositories: photo archives of five PHAROS member institutions: 

1. The Frick Art Reference Library (New York, USA)

2. I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Florence, Italy)

3. Fondazione Federico Zeri (Bologna, Italy)

4. Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History (Rome, Italy)

5. Deutsches Dokumentationszentrum für Kunstgeschichte – Bildarchiv Foto Marburg (Marburg, Germany). 

Methods: UI and UX, collaborating to envision innovative, computational methods for analyzing images at scale

Research presentation: “Scientific Thinking and Narrative Discourse in Early Modern Italy,” PHAROS pilot project meeting, The Frick Collection, New York City, 28 February 2020

2021 Meeting Moderator: I have been invited to lead and moderate the PHAROS Executive Board meeting on 3 November 2021, with Alexander Supartono

Invited talk, “A Language Case Study: Italian IIIF” at the 2021 IIIF Fall Working Meeting, 18 November 2021 (online)

“Diseases and Remedies: Late Medieval and Early Modern Narratives” at the Chiasmi: Brown and Harvard Graduate Student Conference “Medicine and the Arts: Co-relazioni” (23 October 2020)

Panel moderator, “Singing Voices: The Interaction of Music and Text” at the Rutgers Graduate Society Conference, “Voices,” New Brunswick (22 November 2019)

Organizer and panel chair, “Digital Humanities and Narratives of Science, Technology, and Medicine” at the NeMLA convention, Washington, DC (23 March 2019)

Judge in the 2023 University of Notre Dame Hesburgh Libraries Hackathon, Hacking for Harmony, March 31-April 2, 2023

Invited Advisory Board member in Galileo’s Virtual Library, a Digital Humanities project coordinated by Crystal Hall at Bowdoin College, 2022-2024

Reading group facilitator for the Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence, The University of Notre Dame, Fall 2022

Moderator, with Alexander Supartono, at the PHAROS, The International Consortium of Photo Archives Executive Board meeting, 3 November 2021 

As a Co-Chair of the IIIF Outreach Community Group, I collaborate to coordinate IIIF monthly meetings, as well as local and regional meetings and conferences, with Rachel Di Cresce (University of Toronto), Emily Gore (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Lourdes Johnson, and Claire Knowles (University of Leeds), coordinating with Josh Hadro (Managing Director, IIIF Consortium and Pratt Institute) and Andy Corrigan (University of Cambridge). Furthermore, I help the IIIF Community staff to expand the outreach of IIIF to underrepresented communities and languages. I also collaborate to develop the IIIF ambassadors' program, along with projects to translate and circulate training and marketing materials, including Italian, to promote IIIF and its mission in the digital humanities. 

#DLFTeach host, with M. Keane and L. Morreale, in Digital Library Federation (DLF) and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Twitter chats: “Transcribing Together: Crowdsourcing on Digital Projects,” 20 April 2021

Co-founder and coordinator of a special interest discussion group on IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework), 2021

Reviewer for the Aresty Rutgers Undergraduate Research Journal, 2021

Scholar Advisory Group member at the PHAROS pilot project, The International Consortium of Photo Archives, providing feedback on user interface designs and prototypes for a collection of nearly 1.5 million images of early modern artworks and documentation at the Frick Collection; I Tatti at Harvard, Fondazione Federico Zeri, Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute for Art History, and Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, 2019-2021

Co-author and curator: 

• Image du monde Challenge II, a competition to transcribe Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal manuscript 3516, Team Four, 8-22 January 2021

• Image du monde Challenge, Team Chantilly, 25 September-9 October 2020

• Co-captain, co-author and curator in La Sfera Challenge II for the Yale, Beinecke 946 manuscript, 17-31 July 2020

• La Sfera Challenge, Team USA, to transcribe the Yale, Beinecke 328 manuscript, 22 May-5 June, 2020

Storytelling Task Force, Europeana Network Association, 2020-2021

Editor-at-large for Digital Humanities Now, May 2020

Editorial board, peer reviewer, and book reviewer for the Graduate Journal of Food Studies, 2019-2021

Vice President of the Italian Graduate Society at Rutgers University, with responsibilities in planning and organizing lectures and events, fundraising, and editing La Fusta, the oldest graduate journal in Italian Studies in North America, 2018-2019

Cultural projects with the Italian Consulate of New York City, Education Office, in particular at the American Museum of Natural History, 2018

Judge at the Rutgers Aresty Undergraduate Research Symposium, 2017-2018

Production Editor of Italian Quarterly, 2016-2017

Judge at the American National Junior Classical League Creative Writing Contest, 2014-2015

“Italian Immigration in the US: Images, Stories, and Songs,” a lecture with guest speakers, Italian-American band Mebanesville, 20 November 2014

Here I will collect and share current project ideas, community outreach, public engagement, and more...  

💬 Keywords: Digital Humanities, History of Science, illustrated manuscripts, philology, IIIF