Documenting the Past, Triaging the Present and Assessing the Future: A Prototype for Sicily's Norman Heritage, ca. 1061-1194

The planning and development of an online database that would aggregate information on the historic buildings and monuments of Sicily's Norman period, dating from 1061 to 1194. This pilot phase would focus on the 147 monasteries that are known to have been built in this period. The resource would disseminate three types of information: historical and site-specific data for all of the monasteries, photographic and video documentation of the 52 that survive, and any related genealogical data.The Norman Sicily Project (NSP) digitally registers, maps and analyzes the monuments erected during the island's Norman period (ca. 1061-1194), arguably the most auspicious years in its long history. In so doing, it provides new understandings of the complex society that produced them. The project accomplishes this by joining history and earth science in a collaboration made broadly accessible by digital technologies. This application is in support of a pilot project to ensure that the best technological foundation is in place for the NSP's future development. The primary grant product will be a prototype offering access to an entire class of monuments - the society's monasteries - including images, geographic location, onomastic information, chronological data, types of attestation, gender, order, administrative rank, mother houses, dependencies, founders, dates of field visits, seismic region information and sustainability data. These data will be made freely available to the public.