A new multimedia project allows visitors to explore Dante's 700-year-old vision of Hell, purgatory, and Paradise.

Sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, more commonly known as UNESCO, the project features 120 original illustrations from a French translation of Dante's master work.

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Artist Vladimir Liagatchev spent more than 10 years creating the images for a book before he decided to approach UNESCO with the work and his ideas for a digital project.

"I tried to create a concrete image of what Dante imagined: infinite complexity hidden behind a single image," Liagatchev said in an email interview. "The Divine Comedy resonates today because the complexity of this encyclopedic work doesn't preclude the singularity and precision of each detail -- just as the computer is complex and precise."

UNESCO's navigational system is just as complex -- users begin their tour through Dante's world with a single image. They can then choose to navigate Dante's work step-by-step or head straight to Heaven, Hell, or purgatory.

"The complexity of Dante's world can be very well presented on the Web," said Axel Plathe of UNESCO's information and informatics division. "You can really make a journey through his world in a way you can't do with a book."

It isn't the first site to exploit the Web's capabilities to illustrate a complicated text work. Works from T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land to The Bible to Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream have been presented in a hypertext format.

The UNESCO site isn't the first Dante hypertext either. Digital Dante, a project of Columbia University's Institute for Learning Technologies, has been online for six years.

"Dante is so suited for multimedia," said Jennifer Hogan, the creator of Digital Dante. "The text is so visual. In his original manuscript there are lots of little pictures and maps and readers can't help visualizing the work even while reading it."

Hundreds of artists from Botticelli to Blake have produced illustrations for Dante's work, many of which are reproduced on the Digital Dante site.

"To some, projects like this may seem to be simplifying a very complex work," Hogan said. "But the images themselves are instructive metaphors and the Web presentations can engage learners in a way the text can't."

But UNESCO will be satisfied if its project turns on Web-heads to the existence of copyright-free public domain works.

"We could use Dante's work because it's free to all, the copyright has passed into the public domain," Plathe said. "We wanted to reinforce and publicize the idea that many works are free from copyright and can be put on the Internet for educational purposes that benefit everyone."

Ironically enough, recent US laws have extended the length of copyrights just as the Web is making wide distribution of works possible. The 1998, The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act extends copyright protection for most works from 50 years after the author's death to 70 years.

"We don't want to see public domain rights endangered," Plathe said. "We want to encourage UNESCO's member states to bring on public domain information on the Web, encourage libraries to digitize holdings, [and] encourage artists to put work on sites."

Current law mandates that excerpts of almost any work can be used for activities such as criticism, reporting, scholarship, research, and teaching.

UNESCO's Dante site will be up for the foreseeable future. UNESCO is seeking volunteers to translate the French text into English and other languages.