Digital & Humanities

Research, Projects, and Presentations

The Harriot Papers, University of Notre Dame
















I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Notre Dame (2022-2024). 

At the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship, the John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology and Values, and the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society, I am conducting research, consulting on projects in the humanities and computational methods, and I also teach undergraduate and graduate courses and workshops. 

I am a project team member for the The Harriot Papers, a project documenting the work of early modern polymath, Thomas Harriot. 

The outcomes will include a digital and a print edition, as well as educational and outreach events in the US and UK. Research team members are based at The University of Notre Dame, the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the Cambridge University Library, and the project is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)

Digital materials are available online:

Caterina Agostini, Megan Gooch, Robert Goulding, Michael Hawkins, Neil Jefferies, Natalie Meyers, Robert Ralley, Dirk Van Hulle, Arnaud Zimmern, Eds. Unlocking Digital Texts: Towards an Interoperable Text Framework

Here are my training materials on computational methods for the transcription and annotation of early modern manuscripts (September 2022): 

PIs: Robert Goulding, Natalie Meyers, and Scott Weingart; co-Pis: Caterina Agostini, Arnaud Zimmern

The Edison Papers

I have developed two main lines of inquiry: 1. reading room environments that I presented at the 2022 Digital Humanities Conference and Colloquium (University of Victoria, British Columbia, online), and 2. an integrated digital edition across the printed edition, Project Muse, the online repository of Johns Hopkins University Press, the Omeka-S website hosting the digital edition, the Internet Archive, and HathiTrust Digital Library (forthcoming in “Mediating and Connecting: Versatile Digital Publishing in the Edison Papers,” co-authored with Paul Israel. “Digital Editing & Publishing in the Twenty-First Century,” C21 Editions, 2023).

Director and General Editor: Dr. Paul Israel 

2022_DHSI_CC_Agostini_Poster.pdf

Scientific Thinking and Narrative Discourse in Early Modern Italy












My Ph.D. dissertation, Scientific Thinking and Narrative Discourse in Early Modern Italy, explores scientific narratives and cultural productions in the context of the Scientific Revolution.

Director of Research: Dr. Laura S. White; Ph.D. Committee: Dr. Andrea Baldi, Dr. Lina Bolzoni, Dr. Crystal Hall, and Dr. David Marsh

Caterina Agostini, sitting by the Rutgers Academic Building, holds a celebratory plaque for the 2021 Excellence in Outreach and Service Award

Excellence in Outreach and Service Award


I am thankful to be the recipient of the 2021 Rutgers School of Graduate Studies Excellence in Outreach and Service Award for the graduating class of 2021. The award is in recognition of digital scholarly communication skills, experience in the digital humanities methods and tools, outreach and engagement, and academic writing. 

Selected Publications

"A Geospatial La Sfera: Navigating the Renaissance in the Mediterranean." GeoHumanities'21: Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Humanities (2021), co-authored with Carrie Beneš,  https://doi.org/10.1145/3486187.3490207 


Published online on 2 November 2021. 

Screenshot of my article's opening lines, on the journal IDEAH (2021)

“Art in the Time of Syphilis: A Digital Humanities Approach toward Considering a Medical Narrative in Benvenuto Cellini’s Autobiography.” Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities (IDEAH), Volume 2, Issue 1 (2021), https://doi.org/10.21428/f1f23564.97921c12


Published online on 14 September 2021. 

Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities (IDEAH) is a peer-reviewed, online, open access journal committed to publishing digital humanities research.

IDEAH is a Canadian Social Knowledge Institute journal.

“Santorio’s Medical Method at the Time of Corpuscularism.” La parola del testo, Rivista internazionale di letteratura italiana e comparata, XXV, 1-2 (2021): 87-99

“Communicating across Cultures: The Case of Primo Levi, Italo Calvino, and Pliny the Elder.” In Translation and Globalization across Classrooms, Communities, and the Humanities. Ed. Concepción Godev. Cham-New York: Palgrave Macmillan Publishing, 2018: 63-77. 


Link to SOAR, the Scholarly Open Access at Rutgers: https://scholarship.libraries.rutgers.edu/discovery/fulldisplay?context=L&vid=01RUT_INST:ResearchRepository&docid=alma991031628449504646 

This study has been included in the Institute for the Study of Human Rights (ISHR) at Columbia University, as it contributes to the academic study of human rights, the worlds of advocacy and public policy, and education in global issues from an interdisciplinary perspective. 


Find my publication on Primo Levi, Italo Calvino, and Pliny the Elder in the Memory Studies portal, a bibliography project developed by the Memory in the Disciplines initiative at Stony Brook University and the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University

"ISHR was the first academic center in the world to be founded on an interdisciplinary commitment to the study of human rights. This remains one of ISHR's most distinctive features. We recognize that on a fundamental level, human rights research must transcend traditional academic boundaries, departments, and disciplines, reaching out to the practitioners’ world in the process, to address the ever-increasing complexities of human rights in a globalized world

(From the ISHR website)

Across Time: Classical, Renaissance and Early Modern Times, and WWII

While Galileo is the main author I study in my research, I am aware that no author stands alone in history or literature. And I do not stand alone either, as a reader and scholar. How Primo Levi and Italo Calvino expressed admiration for Pliny the Elder and Galileo is inspiring, and that reading of earlier authors by post-World War II authors motivated me, in turn, to look deeper for the Baroque and scientific fascination found in texts that twentieth-century authors wrote. Thus, I have investigated cultural connections and textual layers built on encyclopedic knowledge tracing back to Pliny the Elder in the first century CE – an author that both Levi and Calvino read extensively, and back to Galileo, a scientist and writer that changed how science is narrated and expressed in the Florentine vernacular, and later in Italian.

Primo Levi

On the value of reading and writing

Photo Credits: The New York Times

Italo Calvino

Presenting the Italian translation of Pliny's Natural History (Naturalis Historia)

Pliny the Elder

The author of Naturalis Historia, first century C.E.

Historia naturale di Caio Plinio Secondo, tradocta di lingua latina in fiorentina per Christophoro Landino. Venice: Nicolaus Jenson, 1476. 

Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

“Personal Belief and Social Practice in Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia.” Religion and Belief: A Moral Landscape. Eds. Malcolm Heath, Christopher Green, and Fabio Serranito. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014: 129-139.

“Sul filo della musica: armonia e scienza da Mersenne a Galileo.” Essay review of Natacha Fabbri, De l’utilité de l’harmonie (2008). Galilaeana: Journal of Galilean Studies, X (2013): 237-244

In Press

Forthcoming Publications


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

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

Recent Fellowships and Awards

2023–2025 National Endowment for the Humanities grant, La Sfera (The Globe): A Late Medieval World of Merchants, Maps, and Manuscripts” with Caterina Agostini, Carrie Beneš, Laura Morreale, Laura Ingallinella, and Amanda Madden, Winston Black, Monica Keane, Elena Brizio, and Matthew Westerby. Thanks to this funding, we will make a digital publication, critical edition and translation from Italian to English of La Sfera, a fifteenth-century book on cosmology, geography, and navigation by Gregorio Dati (1362–1435)

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

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

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

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

Translations

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”)


Goro Dati, La Sfera

Translation of Goro Dati, La Sfera, with Carrie Beneš, Elena Brizio, Laura Ingallinella, Monica Keane, and Laura Morreale (2022), https://osf.io/preprints/bodoarxiv/92ers/ 

The translation involved our team for one year (April 2021-May 2022), and the outcome is a digitally-inflected extended time collaborative translation project. 

Pirandello, Storie per un anno

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”)

Selected Digital Projects and Publications

Author of “ Notion at The Harriot Workshop,” a video introduction to Notion.so, with video transcript, September 2022


Author of “Medieval Padua Painted City,” May 2022


Milestones at the Machine Learning + Humanities Working Group,” The Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton website (11 May 2022)


“Dear Galileo: Letters on Astronomy” is my ongoing mapping project locating letters in a timeline and classifying them as letters of approval or dissent of Galileo’s astronomical theories


Invited guest blog post “Revealing Data: Ars de Statica Medicina, 1614” in the Revealing Data series, National Library of Medicine blog “Circulating Now,” 5 November 2020


A reflection piece on Renaissance navigation, La Sfera Challenge II, July 2020


“Explaining Words, in Nature and Science: Textual Analysis in Galileo’s Works”, a blog post for Northeastern University Women Writers Project, 22 June 2020


“Digital Humanities Tools in Online Humanities Classes”, a blog post for Rutgers Digital Humanities Initiative News, 5 June 2020


Paleography and digital humanities, Team USA, La Sfera Challenge, May 2020


“A Sourcebook of Early Modern Medicine” collects sources published in Europe from the 1500s, relating to syphilis


“Santorio’s Medical Method” is an insight into the medical method of Santorio, dating back to the early 1600’s, when he weighed himself for thirty years and he recorded ten thousand measurements from patients


Co-author with N. Cappa, M. T. De Luca, P. Israel, L. Levkovitch, A. Mininni, L. K. Morreale, and P. Scartoni, “People, Place, and Power in Eighteenth-Century Ghent”, examining a festival book (Rare Books and Special Collections, Rutgers University Libraries)

Medical Sources, 1494-1562 

“A Sourcebook of Early Modern Medicine” collects sources documenting studies of syphilis in Europe, in the sixteenth century

Weight and Health (1614)

“Santorio’s Medical Method” is an insight into the medical method of Santorio, dating back to the early 1600’s, when he weighed himself for thirty years and he recorded ten thousand measurements from patients

Part of this study was published in “Santorio’s Medical Method at the Time of Corpuscularism.” La parola del testo, Rivista internazionale di letteratura italiana e comparata, XXV, 1-2 (2021): 87-99

A Festival Book (1717)

Co-author with Natascia Cappa, Maria Teresa De Luca, Paul Israel, Lidia Levkovitch, Angela Mininni, Laura Morreale, and Paolo Scartoni, “People, Place, and Power in Eighteenth-Century Ghent.” The project examines a festival book from the Rare Books and Special Collections, Rutgers University Libraries

Advancing Digital Editions

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. 

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 Narratives: Textual and Visual

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

A Passion for Digital Images 

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: 

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

PHAROS 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

IIIF 

At the International Image Interoperability Framework, I have been Co-Chair of the IIIF Outreach Community Group, starting in July 2021

I wrote a GitHub repository with my IIIF workshop handouts

I wrote and ran the 2021 NYCDH Week workshop on IIIF

I wrote the Rutgers LibGuide: an introduction to IIIF

The Transcription Challenge Framework

The Transcription Challenge Framework (TCF) is a sustainable scholarly model organized to support and promote collaborative transcription of digitized handwritten materials, including manuscripts from all time periods. I am a member of the Inaugural Advisory Board, starting in 2021. Come explore texts with us, build scholarly networks, and share your love of transcription!

Renaissance Astronomy

The zodiac is made of an astronomical belt, with twelve divisions of the Earth's orbit around the Sun, as seen in the Northern Emisphere (Goro Dati, La Sfera, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, Ms-8536, folio 56v)

The Earth

Climate zones, a compass, and a rose of the winds (folio 67r)

Navigation and Geography

A portolan chart is a navigational map representing coastal navigation and merchants' knowledge of an area. Here, Egypt and Cairo (folio 75v)

Selected Presentations

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)

Recordings and Handouts from Conferences and Lectures

Caterina_Agostini_MLA_Poster_Presentation_Transcript20210108.pdf

2021 Modern Language Association (MLA) presentation

"Dear Galileo": Letters on Astronomy, 2021

Poster session, with introductory video and transcripts for accessibility

2021 MLA presentation, Division of 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century Italian Literature

“Interpreting Certainty and Uncertainty: Galileo’s Scientific Treatises and Influence” 


2019 Digital Humanities Conference and Colloquium, University of Victoria, British Columbia

"Art at the Time of Syphilis: A First-Person Medical Narrative in Benvenuto Cellini's Vita

Poster session

Part of this research was published: “Art in the Time of Syphilis: A Digital Humanities Approach toward Considering a Medical Narrative in Benvenuto Cellini’s Autobiography.” Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities (IDEAH), Volume 2, Issue 1 (2021), https://doi.org/10.21428/f1f23564.97921c12 

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?" on 18 November 2021 

Co-presenter with Carrie Beneš, “A Geospatial La Sfera: Navigating the Renaissance in the Mediterranean” at the 5th Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Geospatial Humanities, in conjunction with ACM SIGSPATIAL 2021 in Beijing, China, 2 November 2021 (online). 

YouTube recording (1:48-21:07)

See also the PowerPoint presentation for the Medical Heritage Library

Service and Community Outreach 

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: 


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

Social Media Communication

Italian Culture and Traditions 

Writing for a wider audience on Venetian cuisine, traditions, and more...

💬 Keywords: Cultural Heritage, Venice, monuments, libraries, museums

Forethoughts & Afterthoughts

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

E-mail caterina [dot] agostini [at] nd [dot] edu

ORCID iD https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1695-0433

Google Scholar https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=fJGAHeAAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

Twitter @CateAgostini 

Humanities Commons @agostini

GitHub CateAgostini https://github.com/CateAgostini 

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/caterina-agostini