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Dartmouth Dante Project

About the Dartmouth Dante Project

The Dartmouth Dante Project (DDP) combines modern information technology with nearly seven hundred years of commentary tradition on Dante's major poem, the Commedia.

The DDP, originally developed between 1982 and 1988 (when a prototype was opened to public use), is an ongoing effort to put the entire texts of more than 75 commentaries into a searchable database that anyone can access via the World Wide Web. This gives scholars easier access to the full texts of many important, and, in some cases, difficult to obtain works.

Financial Support

Preparation of this database was made possible in part by two substantial grants from THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES and through the generosity of Dartmouth College, Princeton University, The Dante Society of America, La Società Dantesca Italiana, The Mellon Foundation, Apple Computer Corporation, Digital Equipment Corporation, The AT&T Foundation, and The David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Funds for the 2005 redesign of the database and user interface were provided by Paul and Linda [Bornhuetter, '82] Gridley.

Project Participants

The Dartmouth Dante Project was conceived and is co-directed by Professor Robert Hollander of Princeton University, along with Stephen Campbell of Dartmouth College Computing Services and Professor Simone Marchesi of Princeton University.

The original collaborators, all then teaching at Dartmouth College, included Professors Kevin Brownlee, Jeffrey Schnapp, and Nancy Vickers. The original database design and user interface were the work of Raymond Neff, then Director of Academic Computing at Dartmouth, and Stephen Campbell, Unix System Manager. Organizational direction was provided by Janet Stephens and Jonathan Altman.

Stephen Campbell and Kirt Johnson of Dartmouth College carried out the 2005 web redesign under the stewardship of Malcolm Brown, Director of Academic Computing for Dartmouth College's Peter Kiewit Computing Services.

Dante Lab - The Next Generation

Dante Lab seeks to further the original vision of the Dartmouth Dante Project by reimagining the possibilities for research afforded by the union of digitized text with current web design.

Dante Lab is an online application that allows students and scholars of the Divine Comedy to read and compare up to four texts from the site’s database simultaneously; these texts include Giorgio Petrocchi’s critical edition, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1867 translation, and more than seventy-five commentaries from the fourteenth century through today. The objective of Dante Lab is to create a virtual workspace that accounts for the needs of both students and novices to the poem, as well as serious scholars engaged in contemporary Dante Studies. For this reason, the Dante Lab reader was inspired by the ‘analogue’ workspace of the professional Dantista, who needs quick and easy access not only to the text of the poem’s three canticles, but also to the early commentaries, notes from numerous recent editions, and a concordance that facilitates philological research and interpretive criticism.

Notice of Copyrighted Material

Certain material contained on this database is copyrighted by the original publishers, and is subject to the conditions of the original copyright. Material of this kind is denoted with the tag "This material is copyrighted and reproduced by permission." All material not bearing this tag is copyright 2024 by the Trustees of Dartmouth College. You may freely reproduce the material on this database in any form, as long as it is not for profit or redistribution except as reference in scholarly works, or in violation of the terms of other copyrights. You may not edit the material in any way without the express consent of the Dante Project and Dartmouth College.