(January, 2025) We are pleased to announce the publication of Volume 1 of the open-access Fragmenta mundi book series: Fragmentology. An Introduction to the Study of Fragments in the Humanities and in Cultural Heritage By Alessandra Molinari Release...
Calls for Papers
2024 Call for papers for volume 3 of the open access Book series Fragmenta mundi (Urbino University Press 2026): Fragments and Fragmentariness: The Challenge of Dismantled Manuscripts Please read the CfP here. Edited by: Alessandra...
Media
This is a short version with English subtitles of a documentary video on the present state of the project Textus invisibilis as concerns the collaboration of the Urbino University with the historical archives and libraries...
Fragmentology. An Introduction to the Study of Fragments in the Humanities and in Cultural Heritage By Alessandra Molinari
Release date: May 31, 2025.
(May 7, 2024)
Alessandra Molinari , Roberto Rosselli Del Turco , Katrin Janz-Wenig , Elisabeth Meyer , Andrea Alessandro Gasparini , Federico Aurora. 2024. “The Multi- and Interdisciplinary Relevance of Fragment Studies: Two Cases from a State Archive in Italy”. Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures 13.1: 102-123. (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/926888).
Calls for Papers
2024
Call for papers for volume 3 of the open access Book series Fragmenta mundi (Urbino University Press 2026): Fragments and Fragmentariness: The Challenge of Dismantled Manuscripts Please read the CfP here.
Edited by:
Alessandra Molinari, Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo;
Monica Bocchetta, Università di Messina;
Rolf H. Bremmer Jr., em., Universiteit Leiden;
William Duba, Université de Fribourg;
Jon-Gunnar Jørgensen, Universitetet i Oslo;
Katrin Janz-Wenig, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg;
Roberto Rosselli Del Turco, Università degli Studi di Torino.
DEADLINE: MAY 31, 2024
2023
Call for papers for volume 2 of the new open access Book series Fragmenta mundi (Urbino University Press 2024):
PARCHMENT FRAGMENTS IN THE ITALIAN MARCHES. First Outcomes and New Perspectives from the Textus invisibilis Project
Edited by Alessandra Molinari, Monica Bocchetta, Emma Abate, Nicoletta Biondi
This is a short version with English subtitles of a documentary video on the present state of the project Textus invisibilis as concerns the collaboration of the Urbino University with the historical archives and libraries of the Northern Marche region in Italy (Unione Montana Catria e Nerone).
This full-version documentary video introduces the overall aims and research methods developed in the project, as well as interviewing our partners and collaborators from Italian and European institutions.
Research, Higher Education, and Third Mission Activities
Research, education, and third mission are intrinsically linked to each other in Textus invisibilis. In its earliest years, this was a single-researcher project with occasional collaborations with other scholars; it was focused on the fragments preserved at the State Archive of Urbino. I soon had the intuition that my students would support my explorer mindset with their questions and curiosity, and that they would greatly enjoy a hands-on encounter with the cultural heritage of our territory. Therefore, from the very beginning, I found ways to engage them in my explorations around fragments on many levels.
On this page you will read about:
educational activities;
third mission activities;
research activities. To know about the research design underlying Textus invisibilis, go here.
Educational activities
In 2010, I started organizing university lessons and workshops on manuscript fragments hosted by the State Archive in Urbino for the students in my philology courses and other university students and teachers. Since then, my approach to workshops and lessons on fragments has developed increasingly into a collaborative enterprise with colleagues from the University of Urbino and other Institutions. We have built our workshops on student-centred learning principles by using an interest-driven, enquiry-driven, and research-through-design approach. Besides many initiatives led individually by me yearly, Ermindo Lanfrancotti (University of Urbino), Alberto Carini (then Univ. Urbino, now Univ. Trieste), and I organized 2015 a workshop on virtual restoration of parchment documents at the Urbino State Archive (see the following images).
A 2015 workshop at the Urbino State Archive with Alberto Carini and Ermindo Lanfrancotti on virtual restauration methods for manuscript fragments.
In 2020, Andrea Alessandro Gasparini (University of Oslo) led as a guest lecturer within my courses an online workshop on fragments where the students of my courses designed the logo of Textus invisibilis, as well as designing and setting up the main features of the present website (see the following image).
A detail from the 2020 workshop: the logo design process by my students on Miro
In 2021, in the context of an institutional meeting between the University of Urbino and the Unione Montana del Catria e Nerone around Textus invisibilis, Roberto Rosselli Del Turco (University of Turin), one of the invited speakers, led a workshop on digital editions of fragmentary manuscripts with EVT at the University Library in San Girolamo, Urbino (s. photo); in 2023, a digital humanities workshop led by Gioele Barabucci (then NTNU, now Köln), Federico Aurora (University of Oslo) and Kyrre Traavik Låberg (University of Oslo) took place in the context of the congress Fragments and Fragmentariness in the Humanities and Cultural Heritage (University of Urbino).
Since 2016, we have also created internship programsfor university students. According to these programs, our students may spend 150-200 working hours at libraries and archives in the Northern Marche, such as Urbino, Pesaro, Cagli, Cantiano, Fonte Avellana, and other places (see photo and video). Each internship is tailor-suited to meet the needs of the hosting institution and to provide the professional skills a student would like to acquire and practice while working with the fragments and other cultural goods preserved at that institution. Some of our students used their internship experience as an empirical data set to build a case-study which they presented as a final dissertation at their bachelor defense, and they all contributed to describing the fragments of those institutions for the Textus invisbilisdatabase.
Our educational mission also includes Learning agreements with schools for learning and working skills development. In 2022, we organized two workshops: the first one took place at the Polo Culturale di Eccellenza in Cagli for students of the IT-high school in Cagli, and the second one at the Urbino State Archive for students from the Raffaello lycee in Urbino. Two of their students applied for a 2-week internship at the University of Urbino; this took place in 2023 with a program that involved our University, including the Sanzio digital lab, and the State Archive in Urbino. Another Textus invisibilis workshop is planned in 2024 for schools within the initiative Fonti e carte urbinati.
Third Mission
Besides research (which is the university’s First Mission according to the EHEA) and education (its Second Mission), supporting society and its living environment (Third Mission) should be at the core of every scholarly project. Textus invisibilis has been deeply embedded in the Marche territory from its very onset. The collaboration agreement between Textus invisibilis and the State Archive of Pesaro-Urbino was first formalized as early as 2010 and it has been confirmed until now; a similar agreement has been active with the Unione Montana del Catria e Nerone for the Northern Marche libraries and archives since 2016. Both interinstitutional agreements were signed to include their fragments in our database, promote their cultural heritage goods, and encourage citizenship involvement in the cultural policies of those institutions. A further important collaboration agreement has been active since 2016 with the international scholarly fragment research project Books within Books for promoting the knowledge of fragments from Hebrew manuscripts in the Marche Region. The following events are meant as Third Mission activities involving our project or promoted by us for the benefit of the Northern Marche citizens:
2014, December 11: workshop “Il Programma Operativo Regionale FESR 2014-2020 a sostegno del patrimonio culturale” (Organizers: Urbino University; Marche Region);
2021, September 24-26: Festival “Il libro nelle Terre di Mezzo” (organizers: Sistema Bibliotecario Catria e Nerone, Cagli);
2024, April: Workshop “Alla ricerca del manoscritto perduto” at the State Archive in Urbino, for students of the highschool “Liceo scientifico e delle scienze umane Laurana – Baldi”. The initiative was part of the Urbino Seminar cycle “Fonti e Carte Urbinati.
Molinari, Alessandra (2021), Handwritten culture through digital native eyes: student participation in the digital fragmentology project Textus invisibilis, Open Information Science 5(1):89-118. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/opis-2021-0005/html
