Computerized Comedy

Currently, a scholar of the medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri probably spends days poring over dusty tomes in dim library stacks to find critical remarks on a single line of Dante's epic poem, The Divine Comedy. But thanks to three Dartmouth professors, that will soon be no more: Dante scholars will, instead, be able to conduct their research by tapping a few keys at a computer terminal. This project, and a spin-off program, a national Dante institute based in Hanover, have just received over half a million dollars in funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Together, the projects are likely to make Dartmouth the leading center of Dante studies in North America.

The computer project, called "The Dartmouth Dante Project," will make available via an on-line computer program all of the most important fulllength commentaries ever written on The Divine Comedy some 60 to 80 lineby line critical texts. Once operational, the program will allow researchers to type in a single phrase from The Comedy and receive in seconds a list of comments written about the verse by the most authoritative critics.

Robert Hollander, a Princeton University professor of European literature and president of the Dante Society of America, conceived of the project in the summer of 1982 when, as a visiting professor teaching a Dante course at Dartmouth, he discovered a lack of commentaries on The Divine Comedy in Baker Library. At the same time that he lamented this inadequacy, Hollander noticed the abundance of computer resources at Kiewit and realized that a computer program could solve the problem. He shared the idea with fellow Danteans, Assistant Professors of French and Italian Kevin Brownlee and Nancy Vickers, and with their enthu-siastic response the Dartmouth Dante Project was born.

A year later, the three professors made a formal grant proposal to the Neh and were rewarded with a two year, $240,000 commitment $120,000 in direct grants and an additional $60,000 contingent upon raising the same amount from outside sources.

The grants will fund the work required to prepare and input the 40 to 50 commentaries which will serve as the primary data base for the project. Associate Professor of French and Italian Jeffrey Schnapp, the project's data base administrator and editorial coordinator, said the directors hope to finish the first phase of the project by 1986. When finally completed, the program will include the equivalent of 100,000 pages of printed text.

Brownlee said he would like to see the project continue to expand through the inclusion of more commentaries and perhaps books and articles of general criticism. To make the expansion possible, the directors of the project are seeking support from private foundations and companies with an interest in making such computer projects in the humanities more widely available.

Inspired by the promise of the computer project, professors Brownlee, Vickers, and Schnapp conceived of a second project, a summer teaching institute aimed at improving the quality of undergraduate Dante instruction in the country. "The institute was a kind of logical result of the computer project," Brownlee said. "It became the teaching dimension of the data base."

Last spring, the professors sent a separate proposal to the NEH for the Dartmouth Dante Institute. Like the first, the second proposal was well-received. The NEH granted them $285,000 for two years to fund a six week summer program, with the possibility of a $165,000 renewal for a third year.

Brownlee said the institute's intended participants are instructors of undergraduate Dante courses who are not Dante specialists. He said that because The Comedy is a poem which is being taught in various academic departments across the country, the institute will choose up to 30 participants from a pool of applicants representing several disciplines: philosophy, history, musicol ogy, humanities, art history, linguistics, and religion, as well as literature.

"There are large numbers of vital, motivated people who have been teaching Dante to undergraduates, but who simply have not been able to immerse themselves in all of the exciting scholarship that has been produced," Brownlee explained. "The fundamental belief here is that scholarship and teaching are reinforcing."

At the first Dante institute, to be held this summer in Hanover, the participants will take intensive courses on TheComedy every morning and attend sem

inars and lectures on special topics in the afternoon. Three leading Dante scholars will be in residence during the institute for a week each: Hollander; Guiseppe Mazotta, professor of Italian at Yale University; and John Freccero, professor of Italian at Stanford University. Schnapp said he expects the computer program to be operational on an experimental basis by the time the institute begins, so that the participants will be able to benefit from it.

The NEH has designated both Dartmouth projects as models for similar proposals in the humanities. One NEH official who reviewed the computer proposal commented, "It is not hyperbole to predict that the Dartmouth project will revolutionize the field [of Dante studies]. ... It focuses on means, on the kind of literary research that really benefits from instead of being crushed by computerization; it envisages the best imaginable application of computer technology to humanistic scholarship."

Brownlee said he thinks Dartmouth's reputation as a liberal arts institution was an important reason why the NEH chose the College as the recipient of two major humanities grants. "Dartmouth is known for its long term, very serious commitment to high quality undergraduate teaching," Brownlee pointed out, "and that's what these projects are all about."

Transforming pages of literary commentary into bytes of computer data is the task of "TheDartmouth Dante Project," one of two major programs based at Dartmouth on the medievalItalian poet. Among those involved in the computerization project are Assistant Professorof French and Italian Jeffrey Schnapp, center, and Associate Professor of French and ItalianKevin Brownlee, right, both looking over the shoulder of student operator Jonathan Skurnik'86 at the keyboard.