Today, 33 years after the project released its prototype, “it is a go-to tool,” said Jeffrey Schnapp, a scholar of medieval Italian literature who helped oversee the Dante Project and who is the founder and director of metaLAB, a digital arts and humanities laboratory at Harvard. Undergrads used scanners the size of refrigerators. He secured funding from Apple and AT&T for what came to be known as the Dartmouth Dante Project. In the early 1980s, when few scholars had ever applied computer technology to the study of literature, Professor Hollander set out to digitize the “Divine Comedy” commentaries. Yet the commentaries became, for Professor Hollander, the engine of his most innovative work. Devotion to it is devotion to an extreme form of traditionalism. Such a body of writing more closely resembles Talmudic exegesis than literary criticism. He mastered seven centuries of line-by-line commentary about the poem. To study his own favorite masterpiece, Dante Alighieri’s “The Divine Comedy,” Professor Hollander held himself to a yet higher standard. Robert Hollander was the sort of literature professor to recommend “years of rereading” to understand a great book.
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