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Dante Society Mellon Vassar College
Joint Planning Grant submitted Thursday |
Our long-term goal is to make available to the many teachers and scholars, within the Society and without, a broad and deep collection of carefully selected and edited images related to the hundred cantos of the Comedy. Such an archive would support the many courses wholly or partially dedicated to Dante, which are offered in the curricula of North American universities, colleges, community colleges and high schools. The archive will be developed at Vassar College, under the editorial direction of the Dante Society. Before embarking on this project we wish to engage in an eighteen-month period of planning. Our goal in this Planning Grant is to produce a module and by so doing to experience directly the actual issues and problems that would arise in the larger project, and on the basis of this experience to establish policies, standards, norms, guidelines for that project. The module will also be submitted to the DSA for comment and criticism that would be taken into account in planning the larger project.
After deliberation by the President, Teodolinda Barolini, and the Council of the DSA, and after several conversations with your Foundation and officials at Vassar College, and in response to your invitation to present a proposal for a planning grant, the Dante Society endorsed this project at its meeting in May 01. This projected image archive along with the capital campaign on which the DSA is embarking will together serve to advance the Society's mission to promote knowledge of Dante's poem. As a small learned society (the oldest in the United States) whose membership of over 400 includes many scholars, teachers and readers of Dante (including art historians), we believe that we offer a new paradigm for scholarly collaboration. Projects of this kind are usually based on the single institutions or consortia of such institutions. Our membership constitutes a unique and stable network of scholars in many major universities and colleges. We will be drawing upon on our members' expertise both as active scholars and as teachers to a wide variety of audiences. Many members have in fact assembled teaching collections of such images and in some cases their institutions support important collections of such materials (e.g. Cornell, Notre Dame, Mount Holyoke). The Society has a long history of producing scholarly tools such as concordances and bibliographies. Our experience in producing a major annual journal, Dante Studies, provides, we believe, a useful model of collaborative long-term effort between Dante scholars. Meeting formally twice a year, the editor and editorial board, review and referee a variety of manuscripts (solicited and unsolicited). Recently the number of articles on Dante on the visual arts has increased. We see the Dante image Archive as a parallel and complementary venture.
Vassar provides a particularly favorable environment for this planning and developing this project. In the past the College has received grants from Mellon for teaching with technology and a Vassar-Williams consortial grant for Foreign Languages. The design of a successful course-based Dante website developed by John Ahern was funded by the former. For the past two years the Acting Dean of the College, Barbara Page, and the Grants Officer, Amanda Thornton, have participated actively in discussions regarding this project, and have encouraged it. The development of image collections is at present a central concern at the College. Over the past five years the managers of several large image collections at Vassar have explored the possibilities for creating their own image database that would serve more directly and satisfactorily the needs of their users. During these explorations the faculty, administrators, and technologists have come to appreciate the heterogeneity of these image collections and the idiosyncrasies of the data bases which store them. For example, some collections requires digital images dense with pixel information to allow for reimaging and detail, another needs less resolution; still another needs text fields corresponding to strict library cataloguing standards, while another's text fields need only reflect the idiosyncrasies of that particular collection; others require sophisticated presentation tools, or only rudimentary web interactivity. All concerned appreciate the importance of creating a "metastructure" which allows these diverse data bases to "talk" to each other, thereby providing access to all data bases in a relatively straightforward way. In Fall 2001 Acting Dean Barbara Page convened an image Data Base Implementation Committee whose purpose is to make the College's image collections accessible to the entire community. The Committee includes managers of several major Vassar collections: the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, the Visual Resource Collection, the Libraries' Special Collections, and the "Old Money" (i.e. ancient coins) collection. Acting Dean Page strongly endorses the addition of the Dante Collection to this group. As an additional but off-site collection which will be nationally (or internationally) dispersed, the Dante Image Archive presents issues and questions different from the Vassar on-campus collections, and as such forms an integral part of the College's development of a campus-wide image data base management strategy for heterogeneous collections. The first step of this broad campus-wide strategy within which the Dante Image Archive would operate is for the Loeb Art Center to contract with Pivot Media in Massachusetts to digitize fifteen hundred objects from the Art Center's collection in Summer 2002. By Fall 2002 the College plans to contract with LUNA Inc. to house the Art Center's digitized images in a collection which will be available to the college community. In the process of digitizing these images Pivot Media will train a local photographer to manage the images and the data fields. The requisite cameras, computers and software will be purchased this Spring and will remain in the Art Center photography studio. Vassar will hire a half-time assistant data manager with a background in visual representation to provide support for the digitizing and management of the Art Center collection. We also intend to employ her in the planning phase of the Dante Image Archive as data manager, assisted by a student in scanning and tagging. Vassar will serve as the fiscal agent for the Dante Society during this planning grant. Both the Dante Society and Vassar College realize that this relatively small project raises large questions which may be beyond the scope of a single learned society (no matter how broadly based and experienced) and of a single college (no matter how committed to establishing and maintaining high quality academic image data bases). Consequently, through the good offices of the Mellon Foundation we hope to enter into dialogue with ArtSTOR throughout the planning process in defining editorial and image standards and establishing policies regarding permissions and other relevant issues.
The following questions have been raised in initial conversations within the Dante Society and would be addressed during the planning process, along with the many others that are sure to arise. 1) Within the confines of a relatively short, crisply edited caption including full tagging and linked to each image, how might we best engage a variety of readers? We wish to contextualize the images in stimulating ways by raising interpretive questions and pointing the way to further study. We do not wish to provide lesson plans or definitive official interpretations. 2) How often would we publish sets or modules of images? 3) What would be the ideal or average quantity of images in a module? 4) How can we best establish a structure whereby we commission specific projects on individual cantos or artistic monuments (e.g. the Baptistery in Florence, the Scrovegni Chapel in Padova, San Vitale and other churches in Ravenna) or subjects, and at the same time welcome original unsolicited submissions, much as we do in publishing Dante Studies? 5) By establishing rigorous editorial standards will we encourage colleges and universities to accept contributions to our Archive as the equivalent of refereed journal articles? If such contributions did in fact count towards promotion to tenure, we would probably receive a good number of high-quality submissions. 6) The Dante Society devotes an increasing number of pages to expensive black and white reproductions of images in Dante Studies. Might it be possible to develop a useful interface between our Archive and Dante Studies which would allow us to post in the Archive color images related to articles in Dante Studies?
Personnel The Planning Group, chaired by John Ahern, Vice President of the Dante Society and Professor of Italian at Vassar College, will consist of three scholars appointed by Teodolinda Barolini, President of the Dante Society, several technical consultants and student assistants from Vassar College: 1) David Susman, Web Manager, who has worked extensively with Oracle and developed an in-house image data base; 2) Rain Breaw, Media Cloisters Curator, who will design the template that will identify the "look" of the site and will insure that the Oracle back end and the Interface can "speak" to each other and work seamlessly; she will be assisted by: 3) Meg Brown, Web Administrator, College Relations; 4) Sandra Lauria, who is about to be hired for the Art Center digitization project; her expertise in managing data input, once the digitized image has been created, will ensure that the fields are consistent and that the images are logged and numbered, and that the data entry corresponds to a consistent standard, probably the Marc standard; 5) the Media Cloisters Copyright Intern, who will seek copyright clearance for the images, develop a process for dealing with releases, estimate cost of copyright releases and identify eventual problems. Schedule The Planning Group will operate from June 2002 to October 2003. At its first meeting at Vassar in June it will: 1) prepare an announcement of the projected Archive along with a questionnaire to all DSA members, in order to draw up a map of personal and institutional collections of Dante images in North America and to solicit ideas and proposals; 2) determine the content of a sample module (template) based probably on a well known canto such as Inferno 5 or 26, and consisting of about 20-40 images; 3) examine issues and options regarding web and data base design, image quality and image tagging. In the following months the members of the Planning Group will consult in person and through e-mail, phone calls and conference calls when appropriate, as they evaluate results of the polling and more sharply define the options in item 3. In October 2002 the Planning Group will report to and consult with the President and Council of the Dante Society when it meets at Columbia University. Afterwards the Planning Group will begin work on the production of the module, sharing in the work of selecting and tagging images. The Planning Group will report to the Dante Society at its May meeting at Harvard University and also demonstrate the module, seeking in depth response from the Council and President as well members in attendance. In Summer 2003 the Planning Group will revise the module and prepare a final report in the form of the draft of a proposal for a three-year Mellon grant to establish the Dante Image Archive. It will present this proposal to the Dante Society at its meeting in October 2003. At least three kinds of issues will be addressed: 1) copyright/ legal; 2) long-term maintenance costs--personnel and equipment; 3) the archive's status within the structures of the Dante Society. |