Dantenet

[8-2-1996]

FROM: Bob Hollander DATE: 17 Nov. 1995

(update 6 Jan. 1996)

SUBJECT: D A N T E N E T (a resource provided by the Dante Soc. of America)

As a result of actions taken at the meetings of the Publications Committee of the Council of DSA (11/11/95) and of the Council itself (11/12/95) in New Orleans, the DSA has decided to establish the Electronic Bulletin of the DSA. This will be located in the home page entitled "DANTENET" at Princeton University. In that space reference will be made and links made possible to other Dantean resources available on the WWW, e.g., the Dartmouth Dante Project, the Dantean materials at Notre Dame University, eventually the Dante home page at Columbia, and others as these become available, and certainly the ADB as soon as it can run on our home page. The EBDSA itself will reside there. It will have the following characteristics:

• It will publish, at regular intervals, notes concerning Dantean texts. These will be philological, historical, biographical, or more widely interpretive, and will be limited to 1,000 words.
• Submissions may be in English or Italian. Since some members of the DSA may not read Italian with ease, the former is preferred. But there will be no barrier to those who choose to compose their thoughts in Italian. Contributors who are at home in English are encouraged to use that language rather than Italian.
• It will also publish, as these become available, the following kinds of material:
  • queries concerning the works of Dante
  • information about conferences, publications, and other matters relating to Dante
  • discussions of the notes published in the EBDSA.

All of these will be found in the listserver that will run alongside of the EBDSA. This will "publish" as often as items appear that should be made available. In addition, notes may be published on the server as well as in the more "formal" issues of the "Notes," published at (eventually) regular intervals.

Access to the EBDSA and the listserver, for purposes of publishing one's ideas or comments upon those of others, is open to all. Contributions will be accepted or rejected by the editorial board.

The editor-in-chief of DANTENET is Robert Hollander (Princeton University). The other members of the Editorial Board and their university affiliations are as follows: Teodolinda Barolini (Columbia Univ.), Richard Lansing (Brandeis Univ.), Christopher Kleinhenz (Univ. of Wisconsin), Lino Pertile (Harvard Univ.).

While the first "issue" of the "Notes" will not appear until the spring of 1996, the plan is to have the home page and its various services in operation before then. We have announced the opening of this service in the last issue of DSA Newsletter and will also do so on various listservers (e.g., *Humanist*, as well as the medieval listserver supervised by James O'Donnell at the Univ. of Pennsylvania).

EBDSA typographical conventions

DRAFT

The following are the guidelines governing submissions of material to the EBDSA. These are experimental, and may change as we discover them lacking or discover better methods. Please bear with us as we begin the undertaking.

LENGTH: Submissions must be limited to 1,000 words (ca. four normal typed pages or a bit less).

SUBJECT: Any Dantean subject is welcome.

EDITORIAL DECISIONS: These will be made by the editor-in- chief in consultation with the other members of the editorial board. In response to the particular nature of the subject of the contribution, further advice may be sought from the rest of the universe of Dante scholars. We hope that these decisions can be made within days or weeks of submission.

FORMAT OF SUBMISSIONS: These must be sent to either of the following e-address:

{coming}.princeton.edu
or
http://www.princeton.edu/~dantenet
(the Dante Society of America's home page)

Submissions not arriving in electronic form will be discarded. At this time, this requirement, for most contributors, requires the deletion of accents, underlining, font changes, etc., from their texts, if they prepare these first in word-processing software. Thus we recommend that submissions be prepared directly in Unix or other mainframe-resident software, or else be created in word-processing formats that are compatible with eventual transmission as e-mail, i.e., that can be processed as ascii text and then sent to a distant host.

CONVENTIONS: In general (and when applicable) we follow the conventions of *Dante Studies*, the journal of the Dante Society of America. Particular divergences necessitated by electronic publication include the following:

FOOTNOTES: Place in curly brackets before the final mark of punctuation of the sentence or phrase to which they form an appendage. E.g., As Boitani says, "The distribution is perfect" {Piero Boitani, "The Sibyl's Leaves," *Dante Studies* 96 (1978), 89}. Please avoid discursive footnotes. Please note that endnotes are not an allowable option.

UNDERLINING (or ITALICS): Use asterisks at either end of the word or words in question, with end punctuation, if any, AFTER the final asterisk, e.g., *Dante Studies*, the journal of the DSA

ACCENTS: use the mark of single quotes (') for both grave and aigue immediately after the vowel in question. E.g., piu' di mai, agre'ge', imito' il Re Artu', perche' non udi' la questione. Most other marks will be, perforce, omitted, e.g., francais, maitre, Laocoon. Practice may eventually vary, but we will start with these simple (and limiting) rules.

TITLE and AUTHOR: please follow the following rules, as exemplified by the following examples: "Alto ingegno" in *Inferno* 2.7: a New Hypothesis, Alphonse de Musset (Winesap College), Dante in Lunigiana? Further Considerations, Madeleine Mandorla (unaffiliated scholar).

SPACING: after all full stops, whether periods or other marks of punctuation ("?", "!", etc.), please use *two* spaces. Citations from poetic texts longer than three verses should be indented two "tabs," with the first verse of a tercet indented two spaces in addition:

[tab, tab] Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
[tab, tab]mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
[tab, tab]che' la diritta via era smarrita.
[tab, tab] Ahi, quanto a dir qual era e' cosa dura....

Contributors who have questions about these or other issues should consider contacting the editor by e-mail before sending along their contribution.

16 December 1995

Robert Hollander