Extending the DSE: LOD support and TEI/IIIF integration in EVT

Current digital scholarly editions (DSEs) have the opportunity of evolving to dynamic objects interacting with other Internet-based resources thanks to open frameworks such as IIIF and LOD. This paper showcases and discusses two new functionalities of EVT (Edition Visualization Technology), version 2: one improving the management of named entities (f.i. personal names) through the use of LOD resources such as FOAF and DBpedia; the other, providing integration of the published text with digital images of the textual primary sources accessed from online repositories (e.g. e-codices or digital libraries such as the Vaticana or the Ambrosiana) via the IIIF protocol

Livelli di rappresentazione del testo nell’edizione del De nomine di Orso Beneventano

This paper presents the methodological and technological rationale of the scholarly digital edition of the De nomine by Ursus Beneventanus (http://www.unipa.it/paolo.monella/ursus), a proof of concept of methodological innovations introduced by Tito Orlandi. The proposed model goes beyond the dichotomy between diplomatic and interpretative edition. The transcription layers are defined on the basis of semiotic considerations. This edition includes three layers: (1) A graphematic layer, whose minimal units are graphemes, including paragraphematic signs (such as punctuation) and systematic one-glyph abbreviations (such as ꝑ for per). All graphemes identified by the editor are listed in a Graphematic Table of Signs (GToS), a functional part of the edition. (2) An alphabetic layer, whose minimal units are alphabetic letters. The GToS provides the standard alphabetic meaning of graphemes. The editor encodes the alphabetic transcription explicitly (within expan) only when the software cannot generate it based on the graphematic transcription through the grapheme/alphabetic letter mapping in the GToS. (3) A linguistic layer, whose minimal units are inflected words (w), identified through a lemma/morphology combination: the lemma (e.g. lupus, -i) is encoded with the attribute @lemma; morphological information (e.g. genitive singular), with the attribute @ana. This layer is for interpretative visualization, textual analysis, interoperability and collation. A final section of the paper analyzes the strong and weak points of the Ursus edition and discusses strategies to expedite the workflow, in view of the future edition of the Chronicon by Romualdus Salernitanus

the politics of code how digital representations and languages shape culture

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“Tea for two”: the Archive of the Italian Latinity of the Middle Ages Meets the CLARIN Infrastructure

This paper aims at showing how integrating the Archive of the Italian Latinity of the Middle Ages(ALIM) into the ILC4CLARIN repository can provide mutual benefits. Making ALIM availableto a large community of scholars and researchers, on the one side, represents the first step to reduce the lack of resources for Medieval Latin in CLARIN and, on the other side, constitutesan unprecedented contribution to not only linguistic investigations, but also to the studies ofthe culture and science at the basis of the Western European society. The paper describes theadopted approach aiming to keep intact the structure of the archive and its metadata, which areboth accurately mirrored into the ILC4CLARIN repository in order to maintain existing accesspractices of the users. This structure can be found in exactly the same state within the CLARIN VLO. Finally, the paper illustrates the advantages of experimenting with some ALIM data, once introduced within the CLARIN Language Resource Switchboard service: first results are shown from the analysis of some texts with the UDPipe tool suite and the distant reading tool Voyant

A digital critical edition model for Priscian: glosses, graeca, quotations

This paper discusses three key methodological aspects of a model for a planned digital critical edition of Priscian's Ars grammatica: 1. the glossae found in manuscripts and their relationship with the manuscript text; 2. the presence of Greek text and its importance for the recensio and the construction of a stemma codicum; 3. literary quotations from classical works. Such research is connected with the project of a new edition of the Ars, initiated by Michela Rosellini with her 2015 edition of the second part of the XVIII book of the work. 1. Glossae. Their inclusion in the edition poses specific modelling challenges, since they bear a complex relationship with Priscian's text: a glossa lives in a manuscript's page, so it refers to the text of that specific witness, not to the abstract text proposed by the editor, and as such it must be modelled in the edition. This can be achieved in the TEI XML encoding by linking each glossa to the manuscript it belongs to, and to the specific manuscript reading it comments upon. 2. Greek text. As Rosellini pointed out, while contamination is very common in Priscian's manuscripts, it is much less frequent for the Greek portions of the text, so the latter become key for the recensio. In the proposed edition model, Greek passages will be encoded on two layers, i.e. with both a normalized and a palaeographic transcription. As a consequence, not only "substantial" readings, but also "palaeographic" and "orthographic" variants will be recorded for those textual portions, thus providing scholars of Priscian's text with additional philological evidence. 3. Literary quotations. They will be marked with machine-readable and processable citations of their sources through the Canonical Text Services (CTS) protocol and the newly-developed Distributed Texts Services (DTS) specification

magazén | International Journal for Digital and Public Humanities

magazén | International Journal for Digital and Public Humanities is the interdisciplinary journal of the Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities (VeDPH) based at the Department of Humanities at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice undergoing double blind peer review and published twice per year in print, digital copy and web version in open access by Edizioni Ca’ Foscari. The VeDPH is founded upon an initiative of excellence that aims at stimulating an interdisciplinary methodological discourse to serve as basis for the collaborative development of durable, reusable, shared resources for research and learning in the field of digital and public humanities. Its disciplinary domains include Digital Textual Scholarship, Digital and Public Art History, Digital and Public History, Digital Cultural Heritage and Digital and Public Archaeology. The name magazén refers to the historical definition of public houses in the Republic of Venice, which were places of diverse human deeds and thriving including information exchange, commercial bargains and pawn brokerage. Thus the journal aspires to constitute an open platform for a wide range of disciplinary fields and methodological approaches sharing the scholarly potential of a digital and public discourse

Andrea Balbo. Materiali e metodi per una didattica multimediale del latino

Recensione di Balbo, A. (2021). Materiali e metodi per una didattica multimediale del latino. Bologna: Pàtron, 168 pp

Why are there no comprehensively digital scholarly editions of classical texts?

Currently, no 'canonical' classical text with a multi-testimonial tradition has a digital scholarly edition based on a complete digital transcription of all primary sources, and on the automated collation of those transcriptions. Most classicists simply do not feel that they need such editions. I argue that this is ultimately due to the 'canonization' of the corpus of classical texts. Classicists are more focussed on the 'Text' than on the documents (manuscripts) and their texts: they tend not to consider the textual variance in the manuscripts as culturally meaningful in itself, but merely instrumental in view of the constitutio textus. I suspect that we will not have 'comprehensively digital' editions of 'canonical' classical texts with a multi-testimonial tradition until classical philology broadens its research agenda

Istruzione e GAFAM: dalla coscienza alla responsabilità

Since the outburst of the COVID-19 pandemic, school and college remote teaching in Italy was based almost exclusively on the infrastructures and platforms developed by ‘big tech’ multinationals, such as Google (G-Suite for Education), Microsoft (Teams) and Zoom. This raises issues concerning student personal data protection that have been largely underestimated in the public discourse. In other countries, such as France, educational institutions have provided educational institutions with public and privacy-aware infrastructures based on free/libre software. Today the scholarly community has the responsibility to elaborate an analysis of what has happened during the emergency, to outline alternatives that the educational system can apply now, and to avoid the risk that bad practices that surfaced during the emergency enter the system and become permanent. On the other side, educational institutions (ministries, school boards, universities and their consortia) should take on the responsibility to build infrastructures that are public (or monitored by public authorities), based on free/libre software and respectful of personal data. This seems to be the intent of project UNIRE (Rete di interconnessione unica nazionale dell’istruzione) for Italian schools.Durante la pandemia COVID-19, la didattica a distanza d’emergenza in Italia, sia a scuola sia all’università, è stata realizzata quasi esclusivamente tramite infrastrutture e piattaforme proprietarie appartenenti alle grandi multinazionali informatiche, soprattutto Google (G-Suite for Education), Microsoft (Teams), Facebook (Whatsapp) e Zoom. Questo apre problemi di tutela dei dati degli studenti ampiamente sottovalutati nel dibattito pubblico. In altri paesi, tra cui ad esempio la Francia, il Ministero dell’Istruzione ha messo a disposizione infrastrutture pubbliche e fondate su protocolli aperti. La comunità scientifica ha la responsabilità di elaborare e proporre un bilancio ragionato di quanto è avvenuto nel fuoco dell’emergenza per costruire alternative realizzabili nell’immediato del secondo anno di pandemia, e per evitare che pratiche deteriori diventino sistematiche nella formazione scolastica e universitaria del futuro. D’altra parte, è auspicabile che le istituzioni formative (MIUR, USR, Atenei e loro consorzi) si assumano la responsabilità di costruire infrastrutture per la didattica digitale che siano pubbliche, condivise e fondate su tecnologie aperte