“From the past to the future: how modern technologies aid the study of early-modern manuscripts”

Silvana Munzi, Juan Acevedo, Maurizio Cataldo, Luana Giurgevich

The RUTTER project combines centuries-old manuscript study with cutting-edge literature and digital technology, to bring to life the science and technology of early pilots. The earliest Western records depicting the consistent and routine seafaring experiences across the Earth’s oceans on a global scale are found in early modern nautical rutters, which contain sailing directions. These technical documents, along with ship’s logbooks, systematically gather and assess crucial information essential for successfully navigating the oceans. They cover strictly nautical aspects such as courses, distances, and latitudes, as well as details on oceanography like currents and tides, meteorology encompassing winds and storms, and insights into geography, geophysics like magnetic declination, and the natural world. From the Iberian shores through the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, the understanding of the globe was changed by the knowledge and the skill of early navigators. This paper briefly presents how the results of the projects are managed and shared in compliance with digital humanities technologies such as TEI-XML encoding/formatting, the global de facto standard to create digital texts and digital libraries. Digital technologies make academic knowledge more accessible and inclusive, overcoming physical, social and economic barriers. By making research materials and digital resources available openly and free of charge, Digital Humanities allow a wide audience, now and in the future, to access and engage with the knowledge produced in universities.

March 15, 2024, University of Bicocca, Milan, Italy