This short paper serves as an introduction to the Projects section of this issue of Humanist Studies & the Digital Age, since the contributions are connected by the authors' participation in a roundtable at the Modern Language Association Annual Conference in 2017. The papers explore the research outcomes from developing and deploying different Digital Humanities projects with Italian Studies materials. The introduction outlines the different methodologies, critiques of digital approaches, and implications for the field offered by the four contributions. The (...) essay ultimately argues that through their humanistic engagement with the technology that drive the projects, the scholars connect their approaches to timely concerns facing all consumers and critics of digital and computational products. (shrink)

Using Galileo Galilei's Saggiatore and Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso as a focal point, this article evaluates a mixed methods approach for identifying matches of words and phrases that are rich material for close reading and contextualization. The method focuses on ngram matches and networks of phrases that are used together. The similarity of Galileo's treatise to Ariosto's poem is compared to 45 other early modern Italian texts to evaluate the relative exceptionalism or normality of the findings. Ngram matches reveal a (...) series of previously unknown connections between the Saggiatore and Furioso, which indicate an analytical understanding of the poem, rather than borrowing of narrative or figurative expression. Network analysis offers a preliminary outline for two communities of texts that frequently use the same ngrams found in the Furioso. (shrink)

Historians and biologists identify the debate between mechanists and vitalists over the nature of life itself with the arguments of Driesch, Loeb, and other prominent voices. But what if the conversation was broader and the consequences deeper for the field? Following the suspicions of Joseph Needham in the 1930s and Francis Crick in the 1960s, we deployed tools of the digital humanities to an old problem in the history of biology. We analyzed over 31,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers and learned that (...) bioexceptionalism participated in a robust discursive landscape throughout subfields of the life sciences, occupied even by otherwise unknown biologists. (shrink)