What is it

In recent years the so-called Digital Humanities have acquired extraordinary development, which have entered strongly into the collection of research in the traditional humanistic disciplines. Although in fact the boom in the West has begun to be noticed from the Manifesto that was written in 2010 in Paris, and whose fundamental conclusion we can sum up in the objective of developing the progress of knowledge, to reinforce the quality of the investigation and to enrich the knowledge And the collective patrimony beyond the academic sphere, that is to say, addressing a public as broad as the one that can access the means facilitated by the network. 

Thus, our project proposes to favor the reach of specialized, dispersed or difficult access information all related to the dominance of medieval and Renaissance Spanish literature, and specifically circumscribed to the field of poetry and translation. 

The difficulties of a project of this kind are manifold: technological, scientific, information and information processing. Technological, since it requires a double training by the members of the group, since they have to be sufficiently sensitive to the computer aspect and the world of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Scientific, because the materials are in continuous revision and it is necessary to have an intense and extensive knowledge both of the object to be analyzed and at the same time of the techniques of analysis. It is clearly understood that the difficulties of information arise from this hermeneutic multiplicity, from this wealth of possibilities of rapprochement. The information collected, coming from many different sources, and sometimes presented with contradictory methodology, must be unified, re-elaborated and presented with sufficient homogeneity for the purposes of the project. 

Our proposal is to carry out a platform in which are grouped on the one hand various studies on medieval Spanish poetry and on translation into Castilian until the end of the sixteenth century; On the other hand it is our purpose to provide an easy-to-use tool for those who wish to consult the materials gathered there. 

As far as medieval Spanish poetry is concerned, we already have the experience gained through the writing of the History of the Castellana Metric (MICINN, Ref. FFI2009-09300), and the results will be printed throughout 2014 by CiLengua, which can also be consulted at the electronic address: www.centroestudioscervantinos.es, under the section Investigation> HistMetCa. The IP of the project Fernando Gómez Redondo will work in the field of the Castellana Medieval Poetry in order to define the different frames of production and literary reception. 

As for the translation, this is a field that had been forgotten by scholars and that only in recent years has acquired the importance it deserves, thanks largely to the efforts of the other project PI, Carlos Alvar, and of his team. Just one of the members of this team is the creation of CHTAC, Hypertext Catalogue of Anonymous Translations to Spanish (www.catalogomedieval.com), which we will now complete with the inclusion of translations of well-known authors and bibliographic itineraries which have given rise to a part of those translations.