Afterword: “A Space for Farther Travel”

This essay, which closes the volume Questioning Bodies in Shakespeare's Rome, Interfacing Science, Literature, and the Humanities /ACUME 2, Volume 4, discusses the concept of ‘interfacing’, the keyword of the European Socrates/ETNPAcume 2 research program which gives cooperative, reciprocal agency to the categories of knowledge it links together. The essay describes a proposal for a web-based model for collaborative, work-in-progress interfacing, envisioned during a series of workshops and seminars implemented and conducted by Maria Del Sapio and involving members of the two Rome-based Acume2 research units. (“Constructions of Bodies in Renaissance Culture” coordinated by Maria Del Sapio and “Knowledge and Perception of Natural Phenomena” coordinated by Giovanni Antonini), including researchers in the humanities and natural sciences. The web-based model described in the essay sought to provide a digital environment where our widely differing work in progress, competences, experiences, and work and communicative styles could mingle and negotiate cooperation in such a way as to open up new perspectives on our objects of study, encourage the exploration of new possibilities regarding interdisciplinary research methodologies (procedures and end products), provide an open (interacting with the digital ‘universe’ outside our ‘environment’) and live (constantly evolving) resource centre, stimulate thinking about innovative interdisciplinary teaching and learning formats. The essay decribes and details the architecture of the envisioned webspace.