The Chronicle of Higher Education
Date: February 2, 1996
Section: Information Technology
Page: A22

ON THE INTERNET

Columbia U. Scholars Put Dante's Divine Comedy On Line

Scholars at Columbia University are using 20th-century technology to make a 14th-century poem more accessible to students and others.

Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and commentaries about it are being put on line by the Digital Dante project, which is sponsored by Columbia's Institute for Learning Technologies. The project is an experiment that aims to use the Internet to combine a literary text (in multiple languages) with images and criticism, so that readers can move easily among the materials.

The site features the original Italian text and an English translation, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, of "Inferno," "Purgatorio," and "Paradiso" -- the three sections of Dante's poem. Users may also view illustrations or read annotations of many of the poem's verses.

Jennifer A. Hogan, Digital Dante's editor, says she hopes it will interest students in the poem. A graduate student in philosophy and education at Columbia, she says the illustrations remind students that the 700-year-old poem, though difficult to read, is rich in relevant themes.

The World-Wide Web address is: http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/projects/dante/

Digitizing Dante is not a new idea. Dartmouth College has had its own Dante Project since 1982. Available on the Internet through a Gopher server, it features a searchable collection of 46 line-by-line commentaries on the Divine Comedy, some dating to the 14th century, written in Italian, Latin, and English.

Robert B. Hollander, the Dartmouth project's founder, says the data base lets Dante scholars (or Dantisti) rapidly check what other scholars have said about any line in the poem. "You can find out whether your new idea is really a new idea or not," says Mr. Hollander, a professor of European literature at Princeton University.

The Gopher address is: gopher://gopher.Dartmouth.EDU:70/1/ftp/pub/Dante/

Copyright (c) 1996 by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc.
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Title: Columbia U. Scholars Put Dante's "Divine Comedy" On Line
Published: 96/02/02