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), 2024

• Agostini, Caterina, Carrie Beneš, Elena Brizio, Laura Ingallinella, Monica Keane, and Laura Morreale. Goro Dati, The Globe (La Sfera), New York, Italica Press, 2024. 

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.

• In my work as the Thomas A. Edison Papers Postdoctoral Associate, I identified, selected, and implemented 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 conducted historical research and created 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 expanding 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

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)