Digital Renaissance

Abstract

GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS (GIS) , Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), data sets, assets, outputs, sound files: these are terms of art for the information renaissance of our time. Towhat extent are the digital humanities (DH) inspiring research and teaching about the renaissance that concerns readers of I Tatti Studies? My trajectory as a scholar took a digital swerve around 2012, when I found myself wishing for online visualizations of archival documents that were central to my research: how could I work with then-director of the Archivio di Stato of Mantua Daniela Ferrari both to conserve and to make more widely available the thousands of precious and fragile letters in the correspondence files of Isabella d’Este Gonzaga (1474–1539), marchesa of Mantua? How many other participants, with what kinds of expertise, would we need, with what financial resources, to realize this goal?Most importantly, what new research would be enabled by increasing access to the Gonzaga archive? What followed from these questions has not been my metamorphosis into a computer programmer or software developer but rather an ever-expanding set of relations with coproducers whose skills complement and supplement my own. What began as a preservation and access project about manuscript letters has evolved into a multiauthored, multimedia, online environment for study of the Italian Renaissance that is part public humanities, part specialized research tool, and always in evolution. IDEA: Isabella d’Este Archive now embraces an international team of scholars from Italy, the United States, Scotland, and Australia and features highresolution images of some 28,000 pieces of correspondence; an expanding set of music projects, including documentary films; a bibliography; and art historical materials (realized or in production) in projects ranging from databases, to visual and economic analyses, to a 3D, immersive model of Isabella’s famous studiolo. Some