A Geospatial la Sfera: Navigating the Renaissance in the Mediterranean

Abstract

This paper presents the current status and challenges of the La Sfera Project, a collaborative effort to transcribe, translate, and create a digital interface for Gregorio Dati's early 15th century treatise La sfera (The Globe). The treatise's survival in over 150 manuscript copies, many of them illustrated, provides a rich corpus for spatial analysis, but also presents numerous challenges, among them: how can we create a nimble digital interface showcasing the work's unique combination of text, maps, and images? How can digital techniques document vague, anachronistic, or imaginary places? How can we make the interface user-friendly while respecting each manuscript's idiosyncrasies of labeling, orthography, and visual representation? While researchers are increasingly interested in understanding how geographical knowledge and cartography developed in and around the Mediterranean in the 14th and 15th centuries, few reference resources exist which summarize that knowledge or help scholars identify toponym variants. Dati's treatise is unique in how it spans the practical world of cartography (specifically, the history of portolan charts) and the more impressionistic world of travel literature (such as the works of Marco Polo or Ibn Battutah). The La Sfera Project will thus create a multifunction, multimedia interface that can be used both for reference purposes and for teaching-presenting Dati's integrated world of cosmology, geography, and cartography using visual, textual, and spatial data.