Reshaping the figure of the Courtesan in a digital archive: a feminist case study on Veronica Franco

Abstract

This work takes the form of a case-study about the condition of 16th-century Venetian courtesans, with a focus on the figure of Veronica Franco (1546-1591). This dissertation provided an important opportunity to advance the understanding of the digital humanities and their application in archival research. What is needed in order to create a digital project? Where do archives, libraries, cultural institutions and museums meet? How can we produce knowledge from a feminist, intersectional and cross-disciplinary perspective? The initial conceptual part of this dissertation has as objective the identification of the proper ingredients that allow the creation of an intersectional, interdisciplinary and accessible digital project or digital archive. Starting from the differentiation between digitised and born-digital items, the dissertation further describes the aspects of a new ecosystem of knowledge production in the digital sphere based on the FAIR principles. In the Semantic Web, and in this new digital ecosystem of culture, data modelling (RDF), metadata standards and ontologies have become increasingly important. Thus, this work also provides an overview on standards and ontologies that guarantee the reuse of domain knowledge, and underlines the relevance of Accesibility, Reusabily and Interoperability. The second part of the dissertation concerns the mock-up project and its workflow, and it discusses the computational methods and digital technologies that can be used for the visualisation of archival materials, research data and research outputs in digital humanities (TEI, IIIF, Escriptorium, programming languages, etc.). For the realisation of the mock-up the following archival materials were collected from the ‘Archivio di Stato di Venezia’ and were digitised: one deliberation enacted by the Council of Ten (1543), Veronica Franco’s first will (1564) and her trial for witchcraft (1580).