Award: MLA Scaglione Publication Award for Arielle Saiber’s Measured Words

The Modern Language Association of America announced it is awarding its nineteenth annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies to Arielle Saiber, of Bowdoin College, for Measured Words: Computation and Writing in Renaissance Italy, to be published by the University of Toronto Press. The award is one of seventeen that will be presented on 7 January 2017, during the association’s annual convention, to be held in Philadelphia. […] The committee’s citation for the winning manuscript reads:

Arielle Saiber’s Measured Words: Computation and Writing in Renaissance Italy explores the intellectual history of the Renaissance through the lens of the epistemological conversatio between calculation and writing and, more broadly, between the sciences and the humanities. This innovative study analyzes representative works by four “computer-writers,” Leon Battista Alberti, Luca Pacioli, Niccolò Tartaglia, and Giambattista Della Porta, who epitomize different yet complementary ways of enacting a constructive dialogue between textual and computational languages. Saiber’s work is remarkable for its interdisciplinary approach, scholarly rigor, clear focus, cohesive structure, engaging rhetoric, and thought-provoking insights into the meaning of digital humanities.