SEMENSUF is an interdisciplinary and collaborative project at the crossroads of philology, intellectual history, and material culture that adopts basic tools of digital humanities for Arabic literary and religious studies. It aims at providing an open-access scholarly edition and lucid, knowledge-sharing English annotated translation of the oldest extant encyclopaedia of Islamic Mysticism, the Book of Flashes in Sufism by Abū Nasr al-Sarrāj (d. 988). Through its innovative method, SEMENSUF aims at laying the foundations for a new historical and textual approach to the editing of early Sufi sources: the philological atomization of the work in textual units, the study of the manuscript transmission and material culture, and the digitization of later related sources are critical for shedding light on channels of knowledge transmission, centers of learning, and scholarly networks in early Sufism and more broadly in Islamic culture. SEMENSUF strongly believes that editing and translating a 1000-year-old work of mysticism can have a major impact on European multicultural and multifaith societies. In fact, the Book of Flashes tackles several intra- and extra Islamic issues that are still very much relevant to today’s Europe: it highlights how mysticism is and should be considered a genuinely component of Islam, invalidating most contemporary Neo-Salafi claims to the contrary; more importantly, the Book of Flashes reflects a strong concern for and appraisal of heterogeneity and pluralism within Islam. It is a hymn to diversity and to coexistence of different practices and sensibilities which collaborate rather than compete, resulting in a shared spirituality. SEMENSUF thus aims at having an impact on European pluralistic society by making available, to a wide audience, a universal text which will stimulate a reflection on mysticism as a safe space for intercultural and interfaith pluralism, dialogue, and inclusivity.

Although the research area dealing with building, sharing and exploiting linguistic resources and tools for automatic processing of Latin (and, more generally, of ancient languages) has seen a large growth across the last decade, linguistic resources for Latin are still not interoperable. This means that linguistic information is split up in many products that just do not talk to each other. Such a situation results in poor exploitation of the richness provided by all those digital objects for Latin that were produced across years of work. Since Latin is a dead language (thus missing native speakers), all we can and must do is to exploit to the best the information contained in those few and precious texts that survived from the past. This means: - to make the best possible organization and use of the available linguistic resources for Latin (enhanced with web-services for Natural Language Processing – NLP –) for a fruitful integration of the information they provide, i.e. to retrieve and combine information from different sources in the most efficient way; - to make it available linguistic resources whose quality is assessed (curated data sets). The objective of the LiLa project is to connect and, ultimately, to exploit the wealth of linguistic resources and NLP tools for Latin assembled so far, in order to bridge the gap between raw language data, NLP and knowledge descriptions, thus enabling scholars to exploit to the best the currently available resources and tools. To address such a challenge, LiLa intends to incorporate the linguistic resources for Latin into the Linked Data framework, making it possible for them to be published and interlinked on the web and to interact with each other. To this aim, the project will build an open-ended knowledge base for Latin by using the Linked Data paradigm to combine data from disparate linguistic resources, provide NLP web-services and include also Latin into the multilingual Linguistic Linked Open Data cloud.

The Popularitas project aims to provide a comprehensive study of the precedents of populism in ancient Rome. The Latin adjective popularis had a passive meaning (the man who enjoys the favour of the people), but also an active one (the man who seeks the favour of the people). Sometimes this active meaning was employed in connection with ambitious outsiders, wannabe “charismatic” leaders, who took a perspective hostile to the senatorial elite, claimed to have a direct connection with the people, and exploited this connection in order to bypass the institutions, to subvert the constitutional rules, and to gain power. The object of the project is precisely this political attitude, where the legitimate seeking of consensus turned into populism: what are the similarities and differences between ancient and contemporary populism? how far the allegations against ancient populists were well-founded? did populistic attitudes have ideological implications? to what extent populistic methods were effective? what was the people’s feedback? The main output of the project will be the publication of a monograph on the populism in ancient Rome and of three scientific papers; a two-days international conference on “ancient and modern populisms”, open to classicists, modern historians, and political scientists; a course of lectures on the ancient populism in the secondary schools; the creation of an internet site, intended both for scientific and educational use. The Popularitas project will historicize for the first time a much-discussed political phenomenon of our time and highlight similarities (and differences) with the ancient political practice. It will provide the tools for a diachronic assessment of modern populism, opening new research prospects. Its ambition is not only to be useful to the historians of the ancient world, but also to offer to political scientists and sociologist some fresh material and a new starting point for a proper understanding of the phenomenon.

The proposed project aims at the compilation of a derivational morphological dictionary of the Latin language, which connects lexical elements on the basis of wordformation rules, through the use of computational linguistic methods. The final resource will be both a standalone tool accessible through its own website, and interconnected with the Index Thomisticus Treebank (IT-TB), a syntactically annotated corpus of texts of Thomas Aquinas, currently based at the Centro Interdisciplinare di Ricerche per la Computerizzazione dei Segni dell’Espressione (CIRCSE), at the Universita’ Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan. The integration with the IT-TB will be operated through the embedding of the dictionary data within the morphological layer of annotation of the treebank, using TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) P5 conformant XML encoding which will ensure easy sharing and linking of the data across a variety of potentially related projects, and will make sure, through the use of an internationally recognised standard for the encoding of textual data, such data will be re-usable and expandable in the future