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UID:pretalx-spathum24-7A99FC@pretalx.com
DTSTART;TZID=CET:20240926T090000
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DESCRIPTION:Of all misconceptions about the Middle Ages\, one of the most p
 ersistent and erroneous is the idea that people before Columbus thought th
 e world was flat—a myth invented wholesale in 1828 by American novelist 
 Washington Irving. Even medieval schoolchildren began their study of cosmo
 logy and natural philosophy with the round earth\, as we see in La sfera (
 The Globe)\, a curious vernacular textbook written circa 1425 in ottava ri
 ma by the Florentine merchant Gregorio Dati. The present obscurity of Dati
 ’s treatise belies its bestseller status in its own time\, as demonstrat
 ed by its survival in approximately 165 manuscripts and 18 printed edition
 s all predating the year 1500.\n\nDati’s treatise provides a concise int
 roduction to medieval cosmology\, science\, geography\, and navigation: al
 l the basic information a young Florentine merchant-in-training would need
  to understand the natural phenomena affecting travel and trade around the
  turn of the fifteenth century. Yet labeling La sfera a “school text” 
 does not explain the enormous number of surviving manuscripts\, nor the va
 st diversity in their appearance and production values. While some are uti
 litarian owner-produced manuscripts\, many Sfera manuscripts contain luxur
 iously illustrated sets of cosmological diagrams and maps—particularly i
 n book 4 of the treatise\, which provides a port-by-port itinerary of the 
 Mediterranean coastline from West Africa to the Black Sea. Dati’s poem d
 iscusses the voyage along the Canary Islands and the coast of west Africa\
 , the cold waters of the north pole\, the rivers of Central Asia\, and the
  dangerous fauna of the African desert. La sfera’s global perspective is
  also a powerful witness to the eastward orientation of most European vent
 ures of the time—an attitude grounded in the commerce as well as the the
 ology of the period. In this way La sfera crystallizes a crucial transitio
 nal moment of the European worldview somewhere between the invention of th
 e dry magnetic compass around 1300 and the traditional “Age of Explorati
 on” beginning at the end of the fifteenth century. Dati’s treatise is 
 unique in how it spans the practical world of cartography and the more imp
 ressionistic world of travel literature (such as the works of Marco Polo o
 r Ibn Battutah). Further\, its integration of medieval navigational charts
  or portolans with the more classicizing tradition of Claudius Ptolemy’s
  Cosmographia (translated in Florence\, during Dati’s lifetime) gives Da
 ti’s work a major and hitherto unappreciated role in the history of cart
 ography.\n\nDati’s Sfera is therefore long overdue for a modern critical
  edition that will make it accessible to scholars of the Mediterranean wor
 ld\, the history of cartography\, and the history of Italy at the threshol
 d between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Yet before the online catal
 oging and manuscript digitization efforts of the last twenty years\, it wo
 uld have been impossible to establish a good picture of the size and diver
 sity of the large Sfera corpus. While about half of the extant manuscripts
  are still in Florentine libraries\, the rest are dispersed across the glo
 be. As a result\, most of the modern scholarship on La sfera has tended to
  rely on one or only a few manuscripts at a time\, and until the creation 
 of the Sfera Project (http://www.sferaproject.org) no one has tried to ass
 ess the size and scope of the full corpus.\n\nThe Sfera Project is a colla
 borative effort to transcribe\, translate\, and create a digital edition f
 or Dati’s Sfera. The digital medium can support and showcase the multimo
 dality of Dati’s original treatise—which combines texts\, images\, and
  maps—in ways that a traditional print edition cannot. Along with the It
 alian text and English translation\, our edition will incorporate an edito
 rial introduction\, hyperlinked explanatory notes\, annotated IIIF manuscr
 ipt images from a variety of sources\, and a georeferenced ArcGIS gazettee
 r locating the toponyms in Dati’s work. True to the project’s crowd-so
 urced roots (the 2020 #lasferachallenge)\, our digital edition is also des
 igned to be extensible\, in order to incorporate additional manuscript tra
 nscriptions as they are produced either by our pre-existing community of S
 fera scholars or by new users who join the scholarly effort.\n\nThe La Sfe
 ra Project will therefore create a multifunction\, multimedia interface th
 at will present Dati’s integrated world of cosmology\, geography\, and c
 artography using visual\, textual\, and spatial data. While researchers ar
 e increasingly interested in understanding how geographical knowledge and 
 cartography developed in and around the Mediterranean in the 14th and 15th
  centuries\, few reference resources exist which summarize that knowledge 
 or help scholars identify toponym variants. The large Sfera manuscript cor
 pus provides a rich body of evidence for spatial analysis but also present
 s numerous challenges. This paper will explain the Sfera Project team’s 
 analysis and choices with regard to such questions as: the use of GIS and 
 linked open data to locate and identify medieval places in modern terms\; 
 digital techniques for documenting vague\, anachronistic\, or imaginary pl
 aces\; and efforts to balance usability with respect for each manuscript
 ’s idiosyncrasies of labeling\, orthography\, and visual representation\
 ; and database and interface design\, as we attempt to reproduce and make 
 legible La sfera’s complex combination of text\, maps\, and images.
DTSTAMP:20260713T192441Z
LOCATION:MG1/02.05
SUMMARY:The Analysis and Presentation of Global Knowledge in the Manuscript
  Tradition of Dati’s Sfera - Carrie Beneš
URL:https://pretalx.com/spathum24/talk/7A99FC/
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