Working with the Getty Research Institute, our group was asked to create a tool that would help scholars across the globe translate and decipher an unpublished 17th-century Italian manuscript. The manuscript was written by Pietro Mellini, whose text is actually a poem with rhymes that reference artworks from his family’s collection in Rome. The scholars needed a way to share the manuscript online but more importantly, they needed a collaborative space where they could annotate the text and view each other’s annotations, working towards a common goal of identifying which artworks Mellini wrote about.
As project lead, I was responsible for finding and implementing the platform and tools that best fit our needs. Digital Mellini is an unconventional approach to analyzation, sharing, and publishing.
Role: Project Lead
Personal Achievements:
- Developed using the Drupal platform
- Integrated Co-ment software, enabling annotation of blocks of text to individual letters
- Created a comparative side-by-side view of texts, translations, facsimiles, and associated artworks
- Facilitated the import of text in TEI XML format, adhering to a universal guideline which makes content easier to categorize and search
- Accomodated full view of translations and annotations allowing for a larger workspace
- Administered individual scholar accounts with future plans to add functionality to store personal notes and files