Description
Acronym: NOBILITAS
Full title: Medieval texts and digital ontological maps. The concept of how for one of the theories of the 13th century intellect.
Typology: Post Doc
Duration: 01/04/2012 to 31/03/2015
Total costs: Euro 143,700
PAT contribution: Euro 135,692.09
Coordinating body: University of Trento
Project leader: Andrea Colli
Thematic area: History of Medieval Philosophy
Website: http://nobilitas.lett.unitn.it/
Project objectives:
There are words that contribute more than others to characterise the thought of a philosopher, to reveal his intentions and to follow his traces in history. They are not necessarily 'key concepts', collected in glossaries or encyclopaedias; sometimes they are apparently secondary and negligible expressions, whose use, however, is the result of a careful theoretical choice.
How to identify them?
The NOBILITAS research project aimed to show - through a pilot experiment - how a corpus of philosophical texts can be processed and analysed automatically, in order to identify their key-words, the semantic contexts in which they occur, and the most frequent word associations.
Such work, apparently only lexicographic and statistical, in truth enables the creation of semantic maps that open up the possibility for the humanist to explore new concepts and observe ancient problems from a new point of view.
In this perspective, the adjective nobilis and the noun nobilitas have become veritable Key-Words-In-Context that have made it possible to reread fundamental passages in the noetics, psychology and metaphysics of medieval thinkers such as Albertus Magnus, Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, Ulrich of Strasbourg and Theodoric of Freiberg, suggesting new interpretative paths in many cases.
State of the art and solutions to the problem and for the achievement of the objectives that existed before the project, and improvements introduced by the project:
The computer analysis of literary and philosophical texts, the creation of databases, hypertexts or electronic editions has been a valuable resource for humanities studies for many years.
It is therefore not a question of requiring machines to make an additional effort to understand human language, but rather of perfecting the tools so that they can be fully-fledged research collaborators. This task is not secondary in the research activity of the humanist who, on the contrary, must take on the task of designing the software that will process and reprocess the data he intends to submit to it, since, more than any programmer, he is specifically familiar with its contents.
Work organisation:
In order to facilitate the work, we proceeded to simultaneously develop both an analysis of the tools and methods that were to allow a good automatic analysis of medieval Latin texts, and a progressive reflection on the theoretical contents that the word associations to the concept of nobilitas seemed to suggest.
This alternated between the production of scientific articles of a strictly medievalist nature and 'experiments' in cataloguing data.
Results achieved:
The theoretical work on the use and meanings of the occurrences of the adjective nobilis and the adjective nobilitas in medieval writings has enabled the production of a considerable number of scientific papers, including a monograph on the concept of nobility in Albertus Magnus that is currently being published.
Among the methodological results, some of which have also been collected in scientific articles, the creation of DB-Anima is significant. It allows the user to browse, study and search for individual words in the various Latin translations of Aristotle's De anima.
Impact:
Partial and final results of the project were regularly presented to the scientific community.
Of note is the conference Nobilitas. Crossroads of knowledge between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age, held in Trento in 2014 and attended by internationally renowned speakers, and the participation of the project leader in the 2nd Workshop in Medieval Philosophy (Catholic University of America - Washington DC) and the Medieval Lectures (Boston College).
Keywords:
Nobility, Soul, Intellect, Albertus Magnus, Bonaventure, Web-Semantic