how you can help

On April 2, 2025, the Sfera Project PIs received notice that the federal government was terminating the $118,000 grant the Project was awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities in August 2024 (award documentation here). Part of the "Scholarly Editions and Translations" funding stream for collaborative projects, our grant was received after a rigorous application process involving a 112-page application and a funding rate of only 20%. Despite these odds, our 2024– 25 grant was the second such award the Sfera Project had received. 

Our two-year effort to create an open-access multimedia edition of Goro Dati’s 15th-century poem La sfera (The Globe) will integrate images of original manuscripts, a new critical Italian text, an annotated English translation with explanatory notes, and a map interface to visualize geospatial data. The digital edition will also include a historical introduction, pedagogical materials suggesting ways to teach with La sfera, a crowd-sourced submission portal for new data, and other auxiliary materials. This website is being designed and hosted through the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, which is one of the partner institutions on our grant.

Our work will provide a concise and accessible introduction to European science and geography in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance—about 50 years before Columbus—while demonstrating the combined mercantile, intellectual, scientific, and artistic perspectives that created Renaissance Italy. 

Unfortunately, the future of the project is now uncertain. At the time we received the government's termination notice, we were halfway through our second year of funding, with about 70% of work planned for the second year already complete. The NEH staff has mostly been laid off and it seems unlikely that even outstanding expenses will be reimbursed. 

Our website-in-progress is already publicly visible here. We estimate that it will take another $30,000 to complete our work on the digital edition. Most of that money will go to our web developer, whose salary came from five different NEH-funded grants, all of them now cancelled. 

In the case that federal funding is restored, any funds raised will be returned to the donor (if desired) or dedicated to building out the auxiliary materials section of the site. We will also add an acknowledgements page to the website, on which any donor who would like to be recognized as a supporter of the project will be thanked.

This website contains more about the Sferista Project Team, Gregorio Dati, and his poem. Please feel free to explore!