Established in 1984, S.I.S.M.E.L. is an Italian research center devoted to the study of Medieval Culture, providing training to young researchers with an international PhD course.
S.I.S.M.E.L. promotes a number of scholarly research activities and cultural programs, with related printed publications (published by its publisher house, Edizioni del Galluzzo) and/or scholarly databases and digital research tools. S.I.S.M.E.L. also promotes the publication of international scientific journals and collections, and the organization of conferences and seminars. To fully develop its multi-disciplinary research strategy, S.I.S.M.E.L. adopted an internal organization with a dozen of independent but closely collaborating project teams, designing and maintaining a vast number of instruments made available to the scientific community of medievalists (literature, history, and cultural history.
S.I.S.M.E.L. is a leader in national and international research projects in the field of medieval culture and one of the most advanced research centers in Italy for the creation of innovative applications in digital humanities, including: bibliographic and onomastic databases, catalogues of authors, texts and manuscripts, tools for research data discoverability, interoperability and semantic integration and enrichment.
S.I.S.M.E.L. developed MIRABILE as an online platform to make accessible a huge amount of information (more than 300.000 bibliographical notices; info on more than 15.000 medieval authors, 100.000 manuscripts etc.) – resulting from 30 years of collecting and revisiong research data on medieval culture and – since 2013 – is co-developing (with Fondazione Ezio Franceschini) TRAME, a research infrastructure project for the interoperability of datasets about medieval manuscript tradition, including digital images of medieval manuscripts, their codicological descriptions, their textual and philological interest, their cultural significance in the context of the european history, etc.
S.I.S.M.E.L. has also been involved in European programs and projects fostering excellence in science and technology, in particular leading COST Action IS1005 – Medioevo Europeo (a network of more than 200 scholars and researchers from major research institutions across 25 European countries) and participating in the CENDARI project as a technical partner and content provider. S.I.S.M.E.L. is a founding member of DARIAH.IT
[divider type=”thin”]Due to its experience S.I.S.M.E.L. aims at fostering the involvment of the Historians community in the process of integration of digital primary sources and development of digital research tools, leveraging on existing networks (CENDARI, Medioevo Europeo, and the MESO DARIAH Working Group) to represent their scientific needs within the PARTHENOS research infrastructure.
Contacts
Emiliano Degl’Innocenti, PhD
Head of the DH Dept.
Co-head of the MESO DARIAH WG
emiliano@sismelfirenze.it
skype:emiliano.degli.innocenti