Program

Preservation and Access: Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Period of Performance

9/1/2024 - 8/31/2026

Funding Totals

$349,969.00 (approved)
$349,969.00 (awarded)


Florence Illuminated: Visualizing the History of Art, Architecture, and Society

FAIN: PW-296829-24

University of Chicago (Chicago, IL 60637-5418)
Niall Atkinson (Project Director: July 2023 to present)
Anne Conyers Leader (Co Project Director: April 2024 to present)

A project to build a platform that would bring together data from five digital humanities projects focused on the cultural history of late medieval and early modern Florence.

Florence Illuminated, a free online research platform, will be a repeatable model that resolves the redundancies of digital humanities projects on similar topics to offer a streamlined way to share research and build on it. The resulting website will be an extensible platform for data integration and digital collaboration that maintains the autonomy of participating collections. This proof of concept will produce a dataset drawn from five projects on Florentine cultural history to illuminate the city’s social and material infrastructure, one of the most dynamic urban phenomena of early modern Europe. Our platform will allow collaborative exploration of the city’s cultural phenomena—not as a series of discrete well-known artworks, buildings, or elite individuals, but as a comprehensive aggregate of diverse people, groups, spaces, and objects that all contributed to the city’s growth and diversification—on a scale unprecedented in scholarship on Renaissance Florence.



Media Coverage

Project Consortium Awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Brian Laubscher
Publication: The Columns
Date: 5/8/2024
Abstract: Write up in W&L campus newsletter. "George Bent, David Pfaff and Mackenzie Brooks from Washington and Lee University are part of a consortium that was selected by The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to receive one of the organization’s Humanities Collections and Reference Resources (HCRR) grant. The consortium, headquartered at the University of Chicago’s Department of Art History, received $349,969 in total to fund a humanities project titled “Florence Illuminated: Visualizing the History of Art, Architecture and Society.” The project seeks to build a platform that will bring together data from five individual digital humanities projects focused on the cultural history of late medieval and early modern Florence...."
URL: https://columns.wlu.edu/project-consortium-awarded-a-national-endowment-for-the-humanities-grant/

Florence Illuminated project to receive generous NEH grant (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Sara Patterson
Publication: Humanities Newsletter
Date: 7/9/2024
Abstract: Humanities Assoc. Prof. Niall Atkinson is spearheading a comprehensive, collaborative, multi-university digital research platform called Florence Illuminated: Visualizing the History of Art, Architecture, and Society. The National Endowment for the Humanities is supporting this crucial scholarship with a grant of $349,969. It’s one of 238 humanities projects in 2024 to “help preserve and expand public access to important historical records and humanities collections at archives, libraries, museums, and universities” nationwide, according to the NEH.
URL: https://humanities.uchicago.edu/articles/2024/07/florence-illuminated-project-receive-generous-neh-grant

Florence Illuminated Project to Receive NEH Grant (Media Coverage)
Publication: Neubauer Collegium Newsletter
Date: 7/9/1981
URL: https://neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu/news/florence-illuminated-project-to-receive-neh-grant

RSA Members Awarded National Endowment for the Humanities HCRR and Richard Lounsbery Grants (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Renaissance Society of America
Publication: RSA News and Announcements: Awards and Prizes
Date: 10/16/2024
Abstract: RSA Members Awarded National Endowment for the Humanities HCRR and Richard Lounsbery Grants Wednesday, October 16, 2024 Independent digital humanities projects seek to build a freely available online platform for collecting and sharing data and research on the cultural history of late medieval and Renaissance Florence. RSA Members Niall Atkinson (Associate Professor, University of Chicago), Anne Leader (Visiting Fellow, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia), George Bent (Professor, Washington & Lee University), Peter Sposato (Associate Professor, Indiana University), and Lorenzo Vigotti (Università di Bologna) have secured over $400,000 funding for their collaborative digital humanities project Florence Illuminated.
URL: https://www.rsa.org/news/684643/RSA-Members-Awarded-National-Endowment-for-the-Humanities-HCRR-and-Richard-Lounsbery-Grants-.htm



Associated Products

The CATASTO project (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: The CATASTO project
Abstract: Presented overview of project and Florence Illuminated methodology to the Digital Literacy workshop series at Villa I Tatti as part of discussion of CATASTO portion of the collaboration. NEH grant and all five projects referenced.
Author: Niall Atkinson
Author: Carmen Jaramillo Caswell
Date: 5/15/2024
Location: I Tatti: The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence, Italy and zoom