After receiving a $186,000 grant from the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) in April 2006 for her Web site "The World of Dante," Italian Prof. Deborah W. Parker is in the process of raising the site to a more professional level.
The Web site is based on Dante Alighieri's "The Divine Comedy," which is divided into three sections known as canticles: "The Inferno" (hell), "Purgatorio" (purgatory) and "Paradiso" (paradise).
Through this grant opportunity, Parker plans to expand her Web site by including the original Italian texts and English translations of "Purgatory" and "Paradise." The site already includes such documents for "The Inferno."
In addition, Parker plans to add accredited visual and audio elements such as a map of Dante's Italy and a 3-D virtual reality map of Hell.
Spanish Prof. Randolph D. Pope, chair of the department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, said the Inferno was one of the most influential texts ever written.
"'The Divine Comedy' is one of the 10 most important texts in the West," Pope said.
Pope said he has no doubt that Parker's site is extremely useful in understanding the text at its profound level.
Parker initiated the project between 1996 and 1997 in a fellowship with the University's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) to provide supplementary resources for Dante's work.
In the process, Parker has collaborated with faculty members from the history, art and music departments, "Italianists," the Special Collections Library and Cornell University, which has the largest American collection of Dante materials.
Parker said she has seen a tremendous amount of improvement in the overall performances of her students in response to the Web site.
"It helps them recall the content of the poem very well and the test results improve," Parker said.
Parker said she is confident that it will be valuable for a broad range of students.
"Dante has a very visual imagination and the Web site helps users understand some of the phenomena in his descriptions," Parker said.
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