Last May 2nd, the Universitat de València’s Principal, Esteban Morcillo, inaugurated the congress ARTELOPE 2012. Lope de Vega y el Teatro Clásico Español: Nuevas Estrategias de Conocimiento en Humanidades (Lope de Vega and the Spanish classical theatre: new knowledge strategies in humanities). During four days, the congress is gathering in Valencia the best experts in Lope de Vega.

The opening ceremony was attended by Carles Padilla, Dean in the Facultat de Filologia, Traducció i Comunicació, Teresa Ferrer Vallas, director of the Departament de Filologia Espanyola and member of the congress’ organizing committee, and Joan Oleza, full professor at Universitat de València and director of the project ARTELOPE.
During the ceremony, the Principal expressed his ‘satisfaction because this event is taking place at our university, which has a history of more than five centuries.’ He underlined ‘it is advisable to combine new techonologies with the classical subjects. It is each generation’s duty to rediscover them.’

This congress will be useful to present the pioneering project ‘Base de Datos, Argumentos y Textos del Teatro de Lope de Vega, ARTELOPE’ (Database, story lines and texts in Lope de Vega’s theatre, ARTELOPE). This project has been recently published on the Internet, with free access to researchers of the international hispanicism.

According to the organizers, the congress is the ideal space to debate on the new humanities research strategies in the communication society and among the researchers of Spanish classical theatre.
The congress
The congress is analyzing, through lectures and round tables, different topics. The new research techniques, the analysis methods, the coexistence with methods of classical philology, the role of Internet and the tools in it, and the different tools as databases, content management systems, etc., are some topics to be discussed.
26 researchers from different European, Latin American and Spanish universities collaborate in project ARTELOPE, and the Spanish Plan Nacional I+D+i financed it. ARTELOPE is currently operated under the macro-project ‘Teatro Clásico Español: Textos e Instrumentos de Investigación” (TC/12), which is supported by the programme Consolider-Ingenio 2010.

ARTELOPE’s main goal has been the systematization of a complex series of pieces of information and characterization – including the summary of the story line – of all Lope de Vega’s works. This information was systematized in an electronic format, a database able to provide researchers a useful tool for the study and consultation of the vast collection of Lope de Vega’s works.