For the past two weeks, I have been participating in La Sfera Challenge II, an international competition between teams of scholars to transcribe manuscripts of La Sfera, Goro Dati’s 15th-century Italian schoolbook on cosmography and geography. For the contest, each of the five teams raced to transcribe their unique manuscript of the text, which are all held at different repositories. The goal of the project is to transcribe various copies of the same text so that scholars can eventually create an English translation and modern scholarly bilingual edition. This crowd-sourced and open-access project has been made possible through the support of the IIIF Consortium, FromThePage and Stanford Libraries. It has been organized by historian Laura Morreale, who is an independent scholar who works in medieval Italian and digital humanities, and does so much to keep people participating in these fields.
My team, Team Spencer, transcribed a (ahem) well-worn version held at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas (Pryce MS P4). Our intrepid captains—Laura Ingallinella (Mellon Post-doctoral fellow at Wellesley), Karen Severud Cook (Special Collections Librarian at Spencer Research Library), N. Kıvılcım Yavuz (Ann Hyde Postdoctoral Researcher at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library)—used Twitter to recruit our team of Italianists, paleographers and medievalists from around the world to participate in the challenge.
I have already seen brilliant comments from other participants about technical details of the individual manuscripts, especially the scripts and the fabulous maps that decorate the pages (see resources at end of the post). However, for me, this contest really reflects the potential to use social media (in this case, Twitter) to create and facilitate scholarly communities. I joined the contest because one of our team captains, Laura Ingallinella, tagged me as a potential participant in a tweet. To be honest, I was initially a bit apprehensive: while my academic background is in medieval Italian literature and I now work in SJSU archives, my research did not involve transcribing manuscripts and my paleographical skills are self-taught. With just the teensiest little nudge, though, I was on board.
Screenshot of my transcription-in-progress of a page from La Sfera Challenge II.
What I really loved about this project (besides it dovetailing with so many of my interests: early Italian! manuscripts! archives!) was the way that it brought people together during what has often been a rather isolated time of working from home. During the contest, we tweeted about our manuscript (#TeamSpencer and #LaSferaChallenge2), and had a great deal of fun collaborating on the transcription itself. In the team log, members wrote color-coded notes about their folios, asked questions, and encouraged each other. Publicly, on the team page and on Twitter, members shared their progress and their discoveries from working closely with the document. Laura Ingallinella paid close attention to variations in the script, and found evidence that the scribe may have been using more than one manuscript to prepare our copy. Kıvılcım Yavuz discovered that the scribe had missed a few whole stanzas of the treatise—which had not been previously noted! Karen Severud Cook has been compiling and identifying the geographical places in the text and maps. Moreover, because there were teams working at the same time on different manuscripts of this same text, we were able to see and compare highlights. The manuscripts all have different physical qualities and conditions, were written in different types of 15th-century Italian scripts, and have differing degrees of illumination (decorated initials, maps, diagrams, etc.).
As I was telling a friend about the project the other night, she remarked that this is exactly the kind of thing that everyone hoped the internet would let us do. Personally, it has been so much fun for me to contribute to the La Sfera Project as an Italianist and to practice paleography, but much of the value is also in making new connections, learning from experts, and feeling like part of a community.
Lastly, I’d like to share resources about this project as a model for creating academic engagement while we are ‘working from home,’ but also more general resources that the SJSU community can use for research and teaching on related subjects.
General Resources
FromThePage: Software for crowdsourced transcription projects. Individual researchers and organizations can upload scanned documents to be transcribed. Images can be moved and magnified, while being transcribed. I can attest that it is easy to use! You can create a free account to help institutions transcribe archival materials from medieval manuscripts to contemporary letters.
Italian Paleography. This resource is a collaboration created by the Newberry Library in Chicago, the University of Toronto and St. Louis University. It offers a wealth of information about the study of early Italian vernacular scripts, giving background information, digitized images of manuscripts, and pages where you can practice transcription.
La Sfera Challenge II & the Spencer manuscript
La Sfera Challenge Website: The project website has information and updates from the project organizers for both challenges, including a bibliography and resources. The site also has pages for the individual teams with blogposts about their manuscripts, like this one for Team Spencer.
On Twitter: To follow the findings of the project, search #LaSferaChallenge and #LaSferaChallenge2. You can also follow individual teams, like #TeamSpencer
Team Member Research: New findings about the manuscript are already being shared publicly on institutional websites. Karen Severud Cook, the Special Collections Librarian at the Spencer Library, has been working on this particular manuscript for several years and published on it in the past.
Karen Severud Cook. Blog Post: “La Sfera, A 15th Century Schoolbook” (Oct. 19, 2015)
Karen Severud Cook. “Dati’s Sfera: The Manuscript Copy in the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas.” Mediterranean Studies 11 (2002): 45-70.
N. Kıvılcım Yavuz. Blog Post: “To Transcribe or not to Transcribe, That is Not the Question” (July 28, 2020).
Manuscripts and Early Italian at SJSU Special Collections
Illuminated Manuscript Collection (MSS 2015.01.20): The Illuminated Manuscript Collection consists of six color illuminated manuscripts and an informational guide. The 14th and 15th-century fragments from European manuscripts include pages from a book of hours, a musical score and missals. There is also a page from an illuminated 19th or 20th-century Persian manuscript. See: Illuminated Manuscript Collection Finding Aid
Manuscript Facsimiles: There are several high-quality copies of medieval manuscripts that are available for research in the reading room, including the Vernon Manuscript and Marie de Medici’s Book of Hours. See: Facsimiles LibGuide
Early Italian Texts: There are several early Italian printed books in our collections, including several on architecture and a 16th-century copy of Achille Marozzo’s Opera nova chiamata duello, an Italian treatise on fencing. They may be found using faceted searches of the library catalog, but there is also a resource guide that has a chronological list of our rare books and a partial annotated bibliography. See: Rare Books and Manuscripts LibGuide
Here at SJSU Archives and Special Collections, we are excited to connect you with resources about manuscripts, paleography and medieval or early modern studies. If you would like to learn more or access materials for your research and/or teaching, please don’t be a stranger. Contact us at special.collections@sjsu.edu
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