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The Navigli Project is a virtual exhibit that illustrates the cultural history of the waterways of Milan, Italy. Inaugurated in 2016 in the context of an experimental Humanities Lab, this digital mapping project encourages the cultural conservation of water in Milan and promotes water education among its citizens. After providing a very brief history of Milan’s waterways (which were almost entirely covered in the 1930s), this article describes the materials and digital platforms the project utilizes and its many objectives, which include expanding the borders of Italian Studies and Eco-Digital Humanities while remaining deeply rooted in each discipline, serving as reference point for anyone interested in urban waters and those of Milan in particular, and providing students with a broad set of digital and thinking skills that are easily transferable to other courses, projects, disciplines, and careers. Ultimately, the article shows how the Navigli Project anchors artistic and cultural practices to the “real” world by following concepts, metaphors, and creative strategies across media, time, and space and thus draws attention to their rootedness in the materiality of the world.
Notes
1 The exhibit can be viewed at https://serenaferrando.com/four-cities/neatline/fullscreen/milans-waterways#records/549. At the time of publication of this piece, the project is being expanded and translated into Italian. The Navigli Project received internal funding in the form of a Humanities Lab grant. Internal funding was also provided for the DH workshop, and the College hired part-time Research Assistants to update and maintain the exhibit. Indirectly, the College was instrumental to the creation of the Navigli Project by generously funding my Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities at the University of Victoria, BC in the summers of 2016 and 2017. It was, in fact, during my second week at the University’s Digital Humanities Summer Institute that I began to work on the exhibit.
2 http://www.colby.edu/centerartshumanities/arts-and-humanities-labs/.
3 The Lab enrolled twelve students. Attendance to the DH L@unch fluctuated between six and nine.
4 The Navigli Project logo was developed by a student who came to the DH L@unch. The original logo idea was sketched collaboratively in the Lab.
5 StoryMaps is “Esri’s cloud-based mapping and GIS platform” as stated on the official website at https://storymaps-classic.arcgis.com/en/how-to/. On StoryMaps the Navigli Project can be accessed at http://arcg.is/0vfWKj.
6 On the question of “urban ecological citizenship” see Light 2003, 44-65.
7 On the topic of “disciplinary extensibility or the aptitude of a given skill set and knowledge base to prove effective in a distant domain” see Schnapp 2017, 511.
8 I modeled my learning outcomes on Burdick et al. 2012.
9 The Lab met for 75 minutes twice a week. The DH L@unch met every week for 90 minutes and primarily focused on the practice of digital mapping.
10 For the same records in StoryMaps see Figures 5 and 6.
11 Moretti 2013, 48-49.
12 Moretti 2005, 35.
13 See Drucker 2011.
14 Students read Eide’s “Reading the Text, Walking the Terrain, Following the Map. Do We See the Same Landscape?” (2014) and excerpts from Monmonier’s How to Lie with Maps (1991), Drucker’s Graphesis (2014). Visual Forms of Knowledge Production, Moretti’s Distant Reading, and Presner’s Hypercities. Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities.
15 The City of Milan invited us to apply for its patronage and subsequently have the Navigli Project featured in the “geoportale” section of its website.
16 As per Presner’s definition, which he derived from Walter Benjamin. (Presner, Shepard, and Kawano 2014).
17 On the topic of psychogeography and stratified terrains see Debord’s “Introduction to A Critique of Urban Geography” (2006).
18 Students were fully involved in every stage of the Navigli Project, from the choice of itineraries included in the exhibit to the color and size of the droplets that should be assigned to each itinerary to what “anchors” (links) should be added and where and, most importantly, the title of the exhibit itself.
19 For example, one student studied Leonardo da Vinci’s work while he lived at Ludovico Sforza’s court; three students delved into representations of the city in Futurist literature, painting, and architecture; two students read and translated a long poem about Milan by Aldo Nove; and another student concentrated on the history of the Sempione park that was once attached to the Sforza Castle.
20 Among the texts with which the students engaged were Kemp, “Geographic Information Science and Spatial Analysis for the Humanities,” (2010) Knowles, Placing History. How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship (2008), Ramsay, Reading Machines, and Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (2001).
21 One day, for example, during a mapping session students passionately discussed for over forty-five minutes the four-page introduction of Monmonier’s How to Lie with Maps and would have certainly continued to debate his argument that maps, in fact, do lie if class had not ended.
22 “New knowledge is not just new content but also new ways of organizing, classifying, and interacting with content.” (Burdick et al. 2012, 128). For this reason, promotion and tenure reviews should take into consideration the legitimacy and scholarly value of DH work. On the term EcoDH see Cohen and LeMenager 2016, 340-346.
23 See, for example, how the Navigli Project pinpoints the geographical landmarks of De Angelis’ poetry by overlaying his personal hydrography on top of Milan’s.
24 On the topic of material imagination see Bachelard 2006, 5: “There is, under the superficial imagery of water, a series of progressively deeper and more tenacious images.” Also, I want to share a student’s remark on the promise of the Digital Humanities to advance and communicate our knowledge and understanding of the world: “The tangibility of visual representation often is the only method of disseminating complex, abstract ideas.”