ePorte

ePorte is an online research portal which aims to promote collaborative scholarship on the Mediterranean from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern period, bringing together researchers and students across institutions, disciplines, and linguistic specializations. The emerging field of Mediterranean studies is interdisciplinary in nature, encompassing a variety of Humanities and Social Science fields, from Anthropology and Archaeology to Architecture, Art, Geography, History, Literature, Musicology, and Religion. It takes as its object the multiple relationships between different societies and polities, from North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula to France, the Italian Peninsula, the Adriatic, the Balkans, the Aegean, Asia Minor, the Levantine coast, and the Mediterranean islands in the period from roughly 500 to 1800 CE.

In order to maximize the potential of this field to bridge traditional disciplinary divides, ePorte aims to offer scholars and students the tools for the timely production and dissemination of knowledge. The portal, co-developed by teams at the University of Toronto Scarborough and Universität Heidelberg, takes full advantage of new media, and especially social and semantic web technologies. In its fully public version, ePorte will:

1) Promote collaborative research by setting up the interface for producing, exchanging, and editing in real time new scholarly resources in a variety of digital formats;

2) Facilitate access to existing electronic resources by allowing users to annotate and tag entries to reflect different needs and interests. 

As an ongoing project, ePorte aims to serve as a virtual meeting place, seminar room, library, directory, and laboratory for scholars and students. To ensure its continued relevance to the scholarly community and a broader public, it depends on its membership to keep updating and augmenting its content on an ongoing, do ut des basis. ePorte’s success will be measured by its becoming not only a tool for scholars and students in this growing area, but a historical archive in its own right, offering future scholars access to the ever changing nature of digital humanities scholarship.

Registration on ePorte is completely free and open to all scholars and students. Send us an email if you'd like to join.