The research project is based on the proposal of an open-source collaborative platform for interdisciplinary research, called NextPyter, aimed at simplifying complex research workflows and promoting seamless collaboration among members of multidisciplinary research teams. The NextPyter platform represents a significant advancement at the intersection of technology and the humanities, offering numerous advantages for scholarly and interdisciplinary research projects.
The platform integrates the Jupyter Notebook framework into a wider research workflow designed to
facilitate researchers from multidisciplinary contexts, enabling the use of instruments like Jupyter
Notebooks in conjunction with online file storage and collaboration platforms, while supporting real-
time collaboration directly within the Notebook in a user-friendly interface. The chosen software stack
includes Jupyter Notebook as the notebook engine, NextCloud as open-source solution for online file
storage and collaboration, and Kubernets technology to distribute and balance the load over multiple
nodes. The chosen technology stack also allows remote execution of Notebooks, which, combined
with the usage of cloud-based platforms, offers several advantages for data scientists: storage
scalability, parallel computing, resource-intensive tasks on remote machines with specialized
hardware (e.g. GPUs), collaboration, privacy, and security thanks to self-hosted solutions.
To show the potential of NextPyter in facilitating interdisciplinary research collaboration and providing
a flexible easy-to-use and high-performance environment accessible to non-technical researchers,
the platform will be tested over a case study coming from literature and cultural studies. Through the
collaborative platform, researchers in humanities will have the opportunity to create images from
natural language descriptions exploiting generative AI algorithms. Specifically, through an analysis of
Boiardo’s “Inamoramento de Orlando” and the lost gardens of Renaissance Ferrara, the use of the
platform will allow researchers to: a) unveil new interpretative possibilities of Boiardo’s literary text
through the creation of images that originate directly from the text; b) to combine philological
information extracted from the text with data from archaeobotanical studies to generate images that
assist in faithfully reconstructing a lost element of the past, such as the gardens of the House of
Este.
To summarize the most innovative contributions of the project, NextPyter may facilitate complex
research workflow and promote seamless collaboration among researchers from different
disciplinary fields, offering an easy-to-use platform for real-time collaboration capabilities on
Notebooks, enhanced by a file storage system and accessible through an easy-to-use Web-based
interface. The possibility to execute Notebooks on premise or on remote cloud systems will also
guarantee privacy-enhanced management of research data.