La Sfera Challenge
Welcome to La Sfera Challenge, a project that sponsored two two-week competitions pitting international teams of scholars against each other in a race to transcribe eight copies of one text, Goro Dati’s fifteenth-century geographic treatise, La Sfera. This challenge had two iterations: the first took place between three teams from May 22-June 5, 2020 and the second between July 17-31, 2020.
You can see how each challenge progressed on Twitter by following the hashtags #LaSferaChallenge and #LaSferaChallenge2.
So that others may benefit from the work done during these fun but fruitful competitions, the transcriptions, images, and webpages, and other related scholarly products issuing from these challenges have been catalogued in BodoArxiv, and digital projects, hosted by Stanford University, will be forthcoming. Below are some possible projects team members hope to undertake as a result of their participation in the La Sfera challenges during Quarantine 2020. Please check back as these projects develop.
Support for the project comes from the IIIF Consortium, FromThePage, and Stanford Libraries.
Please see the catalogued version of the challenge for more complete and citable information.
Come see us at the Renaissance Society of America!
Current Transcriptions
Current transcriptions and notes can be viewed alongside manuscript images .
Translations into English
A team of scholars is planning to translate this short text into English for classroom use.
Mapping Locales
Several locales are listed in La Sfera, and a team of scholars is working to plot them on a modern map.
Tracing the Manuscript Tradition
Scholars hope to trace variations in the textual tradition of La Sfera texts.
Tracking the Illustration Program
The tradition of images found in the many extant versions of the work has yet to be addressed, and scholars hope to undertake a study of the versions in our corpus.
La Sfera Challenge 