Dante Today
Beth Coggeshall
A crowd-sourced and curated digital archive of popular cultural references to Dante's works in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Overview
Context
The website Dante Today is a crowd-sourced and curated digital archive, which catalogs references to Dante’s works in the 20th and 21st centuries. The site, which I co-edit with Arielle Saiber, regularly receives submissions from a wide range of contributors from around the world. The project actively bridges scholarly and non-scholarly audiences, as it documents the myriad transmedia and transcultural ways that Dante’s works resonate across diverse publics, as our more than 1,200 posts show. We are currently working to standardize the metadata tracked in our database, in preparation for a two-phase redesign of the site, which will 1) enable users to curate digital exhibits via the archive’s materials, and 2) launch a scholarly archive with more robust search capabilities and user permissions. Ultimately, the project’s goal is not only to enrich our understanding of the global reception of the poem, but also to make visible an otherwise invisible transnational community of scholars, students, and artists whose conversation is mediated through this shared cultural touchstone.