Discussing the “Divine Comedy” with Dante: On Crowdsourcing and Transcultural Resonance

Departing from the enigmatic 2006 Chinese-oil-painting-turned-digital-curio Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante, this essay first defines the conceptual framework behind Dante Today, a crowdsourced but curated digital archive that catalogs references to Dante and his works across contemporary global cultures. Then it explains our editorial decision to employ crowdsourcing as the principal mechanism behind collection development. This choice has advantages and pitfalls. On the one hand, crowdsourcing enables the participation of large and diverse publics in collection development, engaging the “crowd” in scholarly practice. On the other hand, outsourcing collection development to the “crowd” threatens to replicate the center-periphery model that Dante’s works are often accused of perpetuating. Although crowdsourcing aspires to democratize participatory heritage projects such as ours, I interrogate the limits of such claims, particularly from the perspective of transcultural and de-colonial scholarly practice. In my conclusion, I articulate our plans for future initiatives that aim to remedy this imbalance.

Keywords: Crowdsourcing, Cultural heritage, Digital archives, Public humanities, Resonance, Transculturalism