Documenting the Past, Triaging the Present and Conserving a Legacy for the Future: A Web App for Sicily's Norman Heritage

A project to develop a bilingual, interactive platform for digital access to the documentation of monuments constructed on the island of Sicily during the late eleventh and twelfth centuries.

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 interpretations of the complex society that produced them, understandings made possible by a collaboration between history and STEM and made broadly accessible by digital technologies. This application is in support of the implementation of a prototype that currently records, geolocates and interprets the society's monastic landscape. The primary grant product will be a fully functioning web app optimized for user experience and public engagement that clearly guides visitors while offering additional classes of monuments (including stability triage for a subset of each), an integrated kinship network of associated people and interpretations of the site's data. Flexible and adaptable, the NSP presents a new model for digital conservation of cultural heritage.