digilibLT - digital library of late-Latin texts

The Digital Library of Late-Antique Latin Texts—DigilibLT—publishes secular prose texts written in Latin in late antiquity (from the second to the seventh century AD). The texts are annotated according to the XML-TEI standards and are offered free of charge to the public for reading and research. Since its creation in 2010, DigilibLT has achieved significant goals: more than 300 texts have already been uploaded, a number that is constantly increasing. In addition, in recent years DigilibLT has added two significant extensions to the canon of authors and works initially designed for inclusion. The first concerns the grammatical works, uploaded to the site based on the best and most recent critical editions. Since 2019, DigilibLT has started another expansion line, this time regarding late Roman law. The first step has been the completion of a Canon of Roman Law, now available on the website alongside the other canon. Uploading of texts has recently started. The implementation of the library continues in compliance with the principles stated from the beginning: clarity in the indication of the editions adopted and any editorial interventions that may have been made; enrichment of the works with short entries on late-antique authors and works; bibliographical references. The query templates and the search options remain unchanged. Libraries, digital or physical, couldn’t exist without readers. For more than ten years, we have enjoyed the encouragement of a wide international readership made up of scholars, students and members of the general public. Moreover, after the initial funding from the Piedmont Region, in recent years DigilibLT has also benefited from the support of the Foundation Cassa di Risparmio di Vercelli

Ontologies and the Cultural Heritage. The case of GO!

Geolat – Geography for Latin Literature is a research project, aimed at making accessible a digital library containing the works of Latin literature (from its origins to the end of the Roman Empire) where the geographic knowledge expressed in the Latin texts themselves can be reused. To do so the core of Geolat is the GO! ontology developed ad hoc to describe the geograph- ical knowledge contained in the texts of the library. The semantic annotation of geographical knowledge allows to highlight that the the perception of the space that ancient populations had in their minds is a type of cultural heritage; and thanks to the annotation this type of knowledge can produce new types of cul- tural objects (interactive maps, editions of texts, etc.). The project is under de- velopment at Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici of Università del Piemonte Ori- entale, and financially supported by Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo

"...but what should I put in a digital apparatus?". A not-so-obvious choice

We propose to develop and expand the concept of ‘digital edition of a text’. The specific value of a digital edition is not only in the digital form of representation of textual information: dynamic rather than static, resulting in better visual or practical usability, but it mainly lies in the ability to work with computational methods on the text and on the information it conveys. Terefore the digital edition of a text should aim to provide adequate data and functionality to further forms of processing

"… but what should I put in a digital apparatus?" A not-so-obvious choice. New types of digital scholarly editions

We propose to develop / expand the concept of “digital edition of a text”. The specific value of a digital edition is not only in the digital form of representation of textual information: dynamic rather than static, resulting in better visual or practical usability, but it mainly lays in the ability to work with computational methods on the text and on the information it conveys. Therefore the digital edition of a text should aim to provide adequate data and functionality to further forms of processing. Hence the idea that the “digital scholarly edition” until now often identified with the “digital critical edition”, can also take other forms focused on other types of ‘scholarly research’: from the geographical knowledge contained in the text, to the historical knowledge (time and events) often inextricably linked with the prosopography, and much more. If the digital critical edition is a type of digital scholarly edition containing an apparatus that analyzes and describes the state of the text in the witnesses, then we can conceive e.g. the digital scholarly geographical edition of a work – whose apparatus contains an analytical description of the geographical knowledge contained in the placenames; the digital critical geographical edition whose geographical apparatus is layered over a base critical edition: The knowledge contained in the text must be expressed in a highly formal manner – the same way that the critical apparatus is a highly formal device – by means of an ontology. The ontology both from a philosophical or a computer science point of view is a structure aimed to analyse and describe the categorical hierarchy of a specific domain, analysing its basic constituents (entities like objects, events, processes, etc.), the properties characterizing them and the relationships which correlate them. The resulting (structural) representation of knowledge allows to resolve conceptual or terminological inconsistencies, providing a dictionary of terms formulated in a canonical syntax and with commonly accepted definitions. It also provides a lexical or taxonomic framework for the representation of knowledge, shared by different communities of information systems that can range across several domains. From a scholarly point of view we can also add that digital critical editions of classical works whose textual tradition is made of many witnesses are still very rare. The ancient literatures scholars usually ask to the digital no more than authoritative collections of texts (TLG, PHI, and online digital libraries). So the opportunity to enrich the digital text with variants (especially from a new collation of manuscripts) has known little practical application. The peculiar nature of textual variance in classical texts, where the discarded lesson is a mistake to recognize and remove, contributes to this closure face to the opportunities of the digital. Consequently a digital critical edition aimed to include a bigger number of variants – that is ‘errors’ – than in printed format is unsustainable in terms of cost / benefit evaluation. Thus a new space for reflection opens, no longer linked to the form (that is to the textual tradition) but to the content of the text formally analysed in the apparatus, which might be thought of as a space open to contain other, new, kinds of knowledge

"… But What Should {I} Put in a Digital Apparatus?" {A} Not-So-Obvious Choice: New Types of Digital Scholarly Editions

We propose to develop / expand the concept of “digital edition of a text”. The specific value of a digital edition is not only in the digital form of representation of textual information: dynamic rather than static, resulting in better visual or practical usability, but it mainly lays in the ability to work with computational methods on the text and on the information it conveys. Therefore the digital edition of a text should aim to provide adequate data and functionality to further forms of processing. Hence the idea that the “digital scholarly edition” until now often identified with the “digital critical edition”, can also take other forms focused on other types of ‘scholarly research’: from the geographical knowledge contained in the text, to the historical knowledge (time and events) often inextricably linked with the prosopography, and much more. If the digital critical edition is a type of digital scholarly edition containing an apparatus that analyzes and describes the state of the text in the witnesses, then we can conceive e.g. the digital scholarly geographical edition of a work – whose apparatus contains an analytical description of the geographical knowledge contained in the placenames; the digital critical geographical edition whose geographical apparatus is layered over a base critical edition: The knowledge contained in the text must be expressed in a highly formal manner – the same way that the critical apparatus is a highly formal device – by means of an ontology. The ontology both from a philosophical or a computer science point of view is a structure aimed to analyse and describe the categorical hierarchy of a specific domain, analysing its basic constituents (entities like objects, events, processes, etc.), the properties characterizing them and the relationships which correlate them. The resulting (structural) representation of knowledge allows to resolve conceptual or terminological inconsistencies, providing a dictionary of terms formulated in a canonical syntax and with commonly accepted definitions. It also provides a lexical or taxonomic framework for the representation of knowledge, shared by different communities of information systems that can range across several domains. From a scholarly point of view we can also add that digital critical editions of classical works whose textual tradition is made of many witnesses are still very rare. The ancient literatures scholars usually ask to the digital no more than authoritative collections of texts (TLG, PHI, and online digital libraries). So the opportunity to enrich the digital text with variants (especially from a new collation of manuscripts) has known little practical application. The peculiar nature of textual variance in classical texts, where the discarded lesson is a mistake to recognize and remove, contributes to this closure face to the opportunities of the digital. Consequently a digital critical edition aimed to include a bigger number of variants – that is ‘errors’ – than in printed format is unsustainable in terms of cost / benefit evaluation. Thus a new space for reflection opens, no longer linked to the form (that is to the textual tradition) but to the content of the text formally analysed in the apparatus, which might be thought of as a space open to contain other, new, kinds of knowledge