About the Project

The ILTweb Digital Dante Project is a long-term effort of the Institute for Learning Technologies at Columbia University to prototype and develop an online, multimedia Dante-related academic resource combining traditional elements of scholarly research with new communication and presentation possibilities enabled by networked digital technology.

In essence, the Digital Dante Project is (or will be) a multimedia translation of The Divine Comedy. It is admittedly not a translation like the Mandelbaum, Sinclair, Singleton, or other, more traditional, text translations. Indeed, the Danteum, in this incarnation, is not even an "original" translation in that it relies entirely on the Longfellow translation for its English text of the Commedia.

In our view, however, the Digital Dante Project does constitute a translation because it integrates (or will integrate) multimedia, as well as hyperlinked text commentary and other materials, into the reading of the Commedia in an innovative way -- a way not previously possible in non-digital media. The Digital Dante Project is essentially a twenty-first-century illumination -- one that intends to take advantage of the existing technical possibilities of our contemporary culture to create a viewpoint -- a twenty-first-century dantisti viewpoint -- of contemporary and historical culture, much like Dante's original work was (in addition to allegory) a thirteenth-century viewpoint of then contemporary and historical culture.

The Institute believes that it is particularly appropriate that this prototype be developed using Dante's work, as Dante the poet well understood the power of images, the icons of a culture, and architectural spaces -- and these are among the elements with which we intend to construct the Digital Dante Project.

It is important to note that we do not intend for this new form of multimedia presentation to supplant the "text" -- rather, we see it as an expansion of the concept of text -- an expansion enabled by new digital technologies to transcend some of the limitations of text in print. The Institute believes that networked digital technologies will increasingly make possible new forms of scholarly work that incorporate multiple forms of media (text, audio, video, and image) as well as hyperlinks within, between and among various resources, with the result that construction will join deconstruction as a valid form of literary criticism and comparative analysis. The Institute further believes that these technologies will increasingly enable, encourage, or even require, group collaborative efforts -- and that this "social construction" will itself become a means of scholarly production, much like scriptoria in an earlier age. We intend the Digital Dante Project to prototype such developments.

Innovation in the way academic studies are conducted is dependent upon the recognition of distinct advantages of the novel approach. We believe that the Commedia is a particularly good example of a text that can be enhanced by the communication tools of our contemporary culture. The Commedia is a conceptually dense journey that is dependent -- even in book form -- upon a visual and auditory intellect, a wide-ranging cultural awareness, and a particular architecture for its understanding. The Digital Dante Project intends to use the new communications technologies to make available much of this contextualizing and orienting material, easily and directly to the reader.

We intend for the Digital Dante Project to be a place for study.