The Italian Virtual Community

	The project of realizing an Italian Virtual Community centered at
the University of Utah could greatly benefit the College of Humanities and
the Department of Languages.

	The Italian Virtual Community will be both an effort to list and
coordinate online resources (everything is reachable via Internet) in the
Italian language and to make them available through a Gopher server. The
Gopher server will be a subdirectory of the main Gopher server of the
University of Utah, and it will be run by myself and Ken Burcham.

	The Italian Virtual Community project corresponds to the goals of
the distance learning program. Through statewide dial-in access, our
gopher server will be accessible to a large public in Utah.

	The community of Italian students, with E-Mail access and computer
literacy skills which will develop from the Italian Virtual Community will
converge with the efforts of professor Steven Sternfeld to develop an
Italian Summer Program based on full immersion and content-based language
teaching.

	This system, beginning with Italian, will give us the ability to
develop similar resources for all other languages. 

	The Gopher server will make our Department more visible nationally
and internationally, thus enhancing our Department profile.

	This is a very critical moment for the Humanities, since more and
more online tools are appearing which may be of use to our field. This is
also a moment when electronic texts and hypertexts such as Italian
literary classics are appearing in the public domain thanks to the efforts
of non-profit ogranizations, including 'The Gutenberg Project", "Manuzio",
"Oxford Text Archives", etc. Regarding "Manuzio", and the group of
philologists led by professor Mario Ricciardi, these associations do not
have yet the means to put their works online, and particularly not on a
Gopher server. We could act as a catalyst and attract to our University
the energies of this spontaneous movement.