Digital plus Humanities

The Chymistry of Isaac Newton


















I am a historian of science at IU Bloomington, where I decipher and edit unpublished manuscripts in the Chymistry of Isaac Newton project, documenting the alchemical work of the famous scientist

My work ranges from deciphering Newton's handwriting to translating passages in Latin and Hebrew into English. Additionally, my team and I conduct X-ray Fluorescence (XRF) analysis to determine the elemental composition of inks, paper, and the detection of watermarks in Newton's manuscripts. 

The project is funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

PIs: William Newman, Caterina Agostini, William Cowan, Michelle Dalmau, Wally Hooper, James Voelkel, and John Walsh.

The Harriot Papers
















At the University of Notre Dame, 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 conducted research, consulting on projects in the humanities and computational methods. I also designed and taught undergraduate and graduate courses and workshops. 

I am a PI for The Harriot Papers, a project documenting the work of early modern polymath, Thomas Harriot. The outcomes 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)

A sample of digital materials, available online:

Caterina Agostini, Megan Gooch, Robert Goulding, Michael Hawkins, Neil Jefferies, Natalie Meyers, Robert Ralley, Dirk Van Hulle, and 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): 

Notion at The Harriot Workshop with a video transcript 

PIs: Robert Goulding, Caterina Agostini, Daniel Johnson, Natalie Meyers, Scott Weingart, and Arnaud Zimmern

The Edison Papers

At Rutgers University, I developed two main lines of inquiry: 

1. Reading room environments 

See my presentation at the 2022 Digital Humanities Conference and Colloquium 

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

Agostini, Caterina. 2024. “Reading Collections in the Edison Papers,” Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities (IDEAH), Vol. 4, Iss. 2 [expected in Spring 2024]

In press: 

Agostini, Caterina and Paul Israel. 2024. “Mediating and Connecting: Versatile Digital Publishing in the Edison Papers.In “Digital Editing & Publishing in the Twenty-First Century,” C21 Editions.

Director: Dr. Paul Israel, co-PI: Caterina Agostini 

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

Selected Publications

Agostini, Caterina. 2024. “Reading Collections in the Edison Papers,” Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities (IDEAH), Vol. 4, Iss. 3, https://ideah.pubpub.org/pub/c7m4pp6e (March 19) 



Agostini, Caterina. 2023. “Translating Absence and Presence: Pirandello’s ‘La buon’anima’ [‘The Dearly Departed’]” PSA, The Journal of The Pirandello Society of America, Vol. XXXV: 131–35, https://www.pirandellosociety.org/psa35toc 


Published online on 2 November 2021 

"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 featured by the Institute for the Study of Human Rights (ISHR) at Columbia University for its interdisciplinary contribution to human rights, advocacy, public policy, and global education.


My publication on Primo Levi, Italo Calvino, and Pliny the Elder is available on the Memory Studies portal, part of a bibliography project by the Memory in the Disciplines initiative Memory in the Disciplines initiative at Stony Brook University and ISHR 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, emphasis mine)

“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

Across Time: Classical, Renaissance, and Modern

While Galileo is the primary focus of my research, I recognize that no author exists in isolation within history or literature, and neither do I as a reader and scholar. The admiration expressed by Primo Levi and Italo Calvino for Pliny the Elder and Galileo is particularly inspiring. Their engagement with earlier authors has motivated me to explore the Baroque and scientific themes in texts written by twentieth-century authors. My investigation delves into the cultural connections and textual layers rooted in encyclopedic knowledge from the first century CE, as seen in Pliny the Elder, whom both Levi and Calvino extensively read, and extends to Galileo, whose innovations transformed the narration and expression of science in the Florentine vernacular and later in Italian.


“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. 

Primo Levi

Reader, writer, and Holocaust survivor

Photo Credits: The New York Times

Italo Calvino

Reader, writer, and author of the foreword to Pliny the Elder's Natural History

Pliny the Elder

Reader, writer, and author of Naturalis Historia (Natural History)

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

Photo courtesy of Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

In Press and Forthcoming Publications

In press:

Forthcoming:

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 (2021–2022), 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 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)

Cryptography

How did scholars like Galileo Galilei, Thomas Harriot, and Johannes Kepler hide and visualize hidden meanings – in plain sight? 

My workshop examines early modern sources and current scholarship through analog and digital methods

Early Modern Women 

Women were actively involved in culture, art, and printing. 


Agostini, Caterina, and Daniela Rovida. 2024. “Women in Early Modern Italy: Art and Printing” 

Digital Work with Medieval Sources 

Why does the work of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) matter? My workshop showcases medieval sources such as manuscripts and art historical images, as well as medieval-related projects and applications.


Agostini, Caterina. 2024. "Working with Medieval Manuscripts or Art Historical Images using IIIF."

http://bit.ly/iiif_digital_medieval 

Renaissance Medical Sources

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

Tracking Weight in the 1600s

“Santorio’s Medical Method” examines the medical method of Santorio, dating back to the early 1600’s. He weighed himself for thirty years and he recorded ten thousand measurements from patients


“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

Writing to Galileo

Galileo received over 2,700 letters about astronomy! Those letters are essential for understanding the dissemination of his scientific ideas beyond formal publications, and that's what I discuss in my forthcoming chapter.


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), forthcoming 

Let's Make Astrolabes! Science, History, and Outreach for the 2024 Solar Eclipse

La Sfera (The Globe): A Collaborative Digital Edition

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.

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)

Digital Images for the Humanities... Plus, the Cultural Heritage World

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: 

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!

More on Caterina's Research

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)

Diet, Weight, and the Authority of Books: Santorio’s Medical Method

Medical Heritage Library Conference, the 10th anniversary conference (2020).


YouTube recording (1:48-21:07) 

See also the PowerPoint presentation for the Medical Heritage Library

A Geospatial La Sfera

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 (2021, online). 

The article has been published on the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Digital Library (2021), https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3486187.3490207 

"Dear Galileo": Letters on Astronomy 

2021 Modern Language Association (MLA) presentation

Poster session, with introductory video and transcripts for accessibility

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

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

A Language Case Study: Italian IIIF (2021)

E-mail cagostin [at] iu [dot] edu

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

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

X/Twitter @CateAgostini 

Humanities Commons @agostini

GitHub CateAgostini https://github.com/CateAgostini 

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