Niall Atkinson (University of Chicago) will deliver the third lecture of the MAP IT | Little Dots, Big Ideas series on Monday, 15 February, at 5.30 PM in the White Hall 111. (**please note this new location**) He will discuss Seeing Sound: Mapping Florentine Soundscapes, a DH project that focuses on Renaissance Florence, taking inspiration from Dante’s expression of the relationship between the sound of a bell, the evocation of a social topography, and the maintenance of a collective memory embedded with the architectural present.
The MAP IT series features six public lectures. See: https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/dmh/.
In Canto VIII of the Purgatorio, Dante describes a moment in which all Christians of his age were united by a sound that mourned the passing of another day. 
But this ring from afar, this “squilla da lontano,” could also pierce the heart of travelers with a certain tenderness, uniting them in a common bond with the inhabitants of a far off city. What Dante heard was the evening bell, part of a complex system of acoustic exchanges produced by bells and towers that demarcated both the temporal and the spatial jurisdictions of the pre-modern European city. A city’s soundscape was as much an expression of its identity as it was a medium through which social relations were forged and negotiated through both ritual and transgressive practices. And since the sound of an evening bell determined the limits of a city’s legal control of a territory and its symbolic presence within the psychological geography of its inhabitants, mapping such networks of sound can shed a great deal of light upon the mutual effects produced by buildings and bodies on each other.
The MAP IT | Little Dots, Big Ideas includes seven workshops for people at Emory. For more information about the workshops and the workshop registration form, see: https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/dmh/workshops/.
Related LINKS
MAP IT | Little Dots, Big Idea series webpage
MAP IT Workshops (Emory community only)
Emory Report’s coverage of the series:And here is a link to the Emory Report’s coverage of the series: http://news.emory.edu/stories/2016/01/er_take_note_digital_mapping_series/campus.html