Literary-philological Heritage & Digital Humanities

The project is a continuation of the two projects “Robert Musil editor of the Journal of Soldiers (Soldatenzeitung) from the point of view of digital humanities” (02/2017-02/2019) and “Industry at the service of historiography. Improvement of OCR technologies for text mining of historical documents” (06/2017-06/2018).

At the center of these projects is a historiographical problem of primary importance for the history of contemporary Austrian literature: during the First World War, in fact, many authors (such as Robert Musil, Franz Blei, Egon Ewin Kisch and Albert Paris Gütersloh) collaborated with magazines of propaganda by writing numerous anonymous contributions.

The attribution of these contributions could shed new light on the evolution of their poetics and on the origin of some of the greatest masterpieces of Austrian modernism.

The statistical-computational methods of stylometry offer the most advanced tools to realize the most complex authorial attributions, as confirmed by many recent scientific studies.

The project focuses on the front magazine Heimat, published in Vienna during the last phase of the First World War.

Its development is divided into four phases: (1) digitization of the corpus of the Heimat (34 issues, published between 7 March and 24 October 1918) through OCR (optical character recognition) techniques and manual correction; (2) creation of a reference corpus, containing the works of undisputed attribution for the authors involved in editing Heimat; (3) stylometric analysis of the texts published in Heimat, comparing multiple approaches and methodologies, in order to identify the “authorial footprint” of the alleged authors with a significant margin of certainty; (4) comparison between the obtained results and the histories of literature and poetics of the early twentieth century in Austria.

The project “Digital bibliography of Snorri’s Edda” aims to create an open-access digital resource to organize and systematize the bibliographical material concerning Snorri Sturluson’s (1179-1241) Edda.

The text is a treatise on poetry designed for the education of young skalds and is of paramount importance to Nordic studies.

The unstable tradition of the text and the heterogeneous nature of the work in genre, style and contents have influenced the secondary literature.
The project consists, first of all, of an annotated bibliographic database that can be progressively updated by users; the entries point to other resources connected to the bibliographic records; the introductory works on Edda and on the project (that can be progressively updated as well) present themselves as critical contributions to research on the text.
One of the goals of the project is to provide useful data on every indexed entry in order to facilitate hermeneutic interpretation of the reception history.

The “BIdialogyca” Research Group aims to digitize but - first and foremost - analyze and study the transmission of numerous dialogues written in the Iberian context, which were translated and published in Italy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this sense, the Research Group intends to work on a large corpus of texts including both the period of vogue, i.e. the sixteenth century, and the phase roughly corresponding to the seventeenth century. As was the custom at the time, translations very often represented rewritings of Spanish works and are interesting for what they add and take away from their originals as well as for the conceptual, stylistic and linguistic reworking effort they deliver to the Italian public. The study and analysis of the dialogues written in the Iberian context and translated into Italian, as interactive and open-access as possible, will allow us to clarify the interweaving between different cultures and peoples continuously interacting in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe on a wide range of topics (e.g. astrological, political, moral, scientific ones).

The Project represents an absolutely original and innovative evolution in strong connection and in dialogue with an important Spanish research project, i.e. Dialogyca BDDH (Biblioteca Digital de Diálogo, http://www.dialogycabddh.es), which for years has been offering the corpus of all literary dialogues written in the various languages ​​of the Iberian Peninsula in the early modern age by resorting to cutting-edge technologies. The Group’s project envisages strong and intense international cooperation with the Dialogyca group directed by Consolación Baranda Leturio and Ana Vián Herrero at the Complutense University of Madrid.

The CEMP project situates itself within a broader research activity carried out at the Skenè Research Centre. Interdisciplinary Theatre and Drama Studies (https://skene.dlls.univr.it/en), which is devoted to source and reception studies, combining genetic and intertextual approaches, with special regard to the elaboration of digital editions of early modern English texts in the context of the migrations of texts and models of the ancient world in European vernacular culture.

Our research consists in the collection of texts pertaining to the genres of the paradox and of the problem which were published in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and which are currently unavailable online and/or not open access.

These texts provide fundamental testimony of the early modern episteme, functioning as a hinge joining widespread forms of the paradoxical discourse in different genres and texts and within the development of sceptical thinking.

The project aims at creating an open-access digital archive featuring diplomatic and modernised editions of selected works, furnished with critical apparatuses and editorial notes, alongside related documentary materials, which, in turn, are relevant to poetic and dramatic texts of the English Renaissance.

The project will (1) provide a digital library which can be interrogated on the basis of a metadata search, (2) lead to the publication of scientific editions, mutually interconnected on multiple hypertextual levels among the several witnesses of a single work or of more works, (3) carry out experimentation on an OCR software tool enabling the automatic transcription of the texts, with special regard to blackletter typefaces.

Within Excellence Project at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures (DiLLS), the Germanic Philology section (L-FIL-LET/15) has launched a project involving the creation of a digital scholarly edition of the whole manuscript tradition of the so-called Alexanderlied, a Middle High German poem belonging to the transnational literary tradition on Alexander the Great and handed down in three redactions (V, B, S).

The first goal of this project is the creation of a prototype digital edition for V (Vorau, Augustiner Chorherrenstift, cod. 276) with diplomatic and normalized transcription. Codicological and palaeographic analysis plus textual analytic (i.e. prosopographical and of the events) and linguistic (i.e. morphosyntactic) annotation will be the focus of the XML/TEI encoding. The editorial work will be a test-bed for both the technology of choice and for the identification of the editorial criteria, which will be later applied to the rest of the manuscript tradition.

To visualize the edition, the open-source software Edition Visualization Technology (EVT, versions 1.2 and 2) has been chosen. The software was first developed for the edition of medieval Germanic texts and is now used within similar projects. Its functionalities include image-text alignment, the possibility to visualize different levels of transcription and to analyze the document by means of manipulation and annotation of the digital facsimile (e.g. hotspot or magnifier). EVT is TEI-compliant: it continues to be implemented by the DH technical support team of the Department of Excellence in order to improve it and adapt it to the specific editorial goals.

Drawing on the research carried out in the 1990s by Enea Balmas and the Gruppo di studio sul Cinquecento francese (http://www.cinquecentofrancese.it) for the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century copies of Pierre de Ronsard’s works in Edizioni cinquecentesche di Pierre de Ronsard nelle biblioteche italiane (Fasano, Schena, 1993) and Edizioni seicentesche di Pierre de Ronsard nelle Biblioteche italiane (Fasano, Schena, 1996), the DUBI (Du Bellay et l’Italie) project aims at mapping the sixteenth-century copies of the works of the Du Bellay family (Joachim, Jean, Martin, Guillaume) in Italian libraries.

The project will therefore focus on the members of a family of poets, historians, generals and churchmen that ranks among the most influential and powerful in France during the reigns of Francis I and Henry II and that is known for its strong and long-lasting relationships with Italy.

The research activity benefits from the collaboration of several specialists in sixteenth-century French literature and history of the book throughout Italy and aims at the creation of the DUBI database, which will be hosted by an online platform along with the other databases of the excellence projects at the Department of Foreign languages and literatures.

The DUBOE project, inspired by the MONLOE Project, Montaigne à l’œuvre (https://montaigne.univ-tours.fr) of the University of Tours, completes the research conducted by the DUBI team and aims at the reconstruction of the Joachim du Bellay’s digital library through the books he read and used in his works.

The project envisages the indexing of an important French women’s journal of the nineteenth century, La Gazette des femmes. Journal poétique, littéraire, artistique, judiciaire et religieux… [1841-1847], in order to create a database. The journal, conserved at Bibliothèque nationale de France, has never been digitized and only a few issues have indexes. With its moderate scope, the journal is very interesting with regard to identity issues, the role of women and their literary as well as artistic production in a period between the first ‘feminist’ movements of the July Monarchy and the eve of 1848 Revolution. The journal also includes articles on women’s history, on general knowledge as well as interesting witnesses on the cultural life of the time. The database should allow for the consultation by date, titles, themes, authors, and hopefully the access to constantly updated bio-bibliographical files.

The project aims at testing the concept of “late style” through the computational tools of stylometric analysis.

Starting from the famous theorization by Edward Said (2006), “late style” has been at the center of a heated critical discussion, which has led many scholars to deny its very existence (McMullan and Smiles 2016).

Faced with the absence of a univocal criterion for identifying the stylistic characteristics that distinguish the late production of the authors, stylometry (a research area that aims at “measuring” the authorial style through statistical approaches) provides objective ground for the analysis.

The project is divided into four phases: (1) critical-bibliographic documentation on the concept of “late style”; (2) creation of a representative corpus for modern and contemporary German literature; (3) corpus analysis using stylometry methodologies; (4) verification (and possible reformulation) of the theory of the “late style” through the results of the analysis.

The first results (focused on three paradigmatic case studies: Goethe, Musil and Kafka) are already in the phase of dissemination through publications and conference presentations (EADH2018: https://eadh2018.exordo.com/programme/presentation/2; DHASA 2019: http://dh2019.digitalhumanities.org.za/schedule/).

The Internet and the digitization of texts have not only changed the way we read literary texts (on e-books, kindles, smartphones, etc.), but also our ways of buying and evaluating books.

While in the past it was mainly the reviews of journalists and literary critics that guided readers’ choices, today thousands of reviews by non-professional readers proliferate on social reading platforms (such as Goodreads and aNobii) and on websites that sell books.

This project aims, first of all, at updating the traditional concept of “review”, which had been proposed by literary criticism and by the linguistics of specialized languages ​​before the advent of the internet, in the light of this digital revolution.

Through the use of computational analyzes on digitized corpora of different types of reviews, i.e. by literary critics (1), journalists (2), and non-professional readers (3), it is proposed to identify the stylistic imprint of these three types of reader. The ultimate goal of this project, which lies on the threshold between literary theory, linguistics and Digital Humanities, is to develop an algorithm capable of automatically distinguishing between these three types of reviews.

The first results (focusing on the aNobii platform, the newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore and the magazines OBLIO, Between and Osservatorio Critico della Germanistica) are already in the phase of dissemination through conference presentations (AIUCD2019: http://aiucd2019.uniud.it/program/; Digital Stylistics in Romance Studies and Beyond, Würzburg, 2019: https://cligs.hypotheses.org/digital-stylistics-in-romance-studies-and-beyond/conference-program; DH2019: https://dh2019.adho.org/event-pilot/).

The project aims at investigating the relationship between spatial pattern and textual meaning in English novels. In order to do so, the project conjugates digital mapping and psychogeography to reflect upon the place engagement and interaction fostered by the narratives and creates related maps. The maps emerge as cultural and dynamic products and bring to light what usually remains on the background of the narratives, thus demonstrating the psychological resonances of specific settings in terms of effects on characters and readers and vice versa. More specifically, the project will deal with cultural and legal issues which enter the London scene in a selection of novels, and will also include imaginative texts.

The research object of the Progetto Mambrino is a vast corpus of Italian romances published in the sixteenth century, as results of translations, sequels and imitations of a large amount of Spanish chivalric romances.

The nature of these texts (very extensive, complex in their narrative interweaving, organized in cycles and connected to Spanish models on several levels) makes it convenient to use the research and scientific edition techniques developed within various disciplines of humanistic computer science.

In the “Literary-Philological Heritage and Digital Humanities” area of ​​the Department of Foreign Languages ​​and Literatures, the Mambrino Project is committed to three closely connected and interdependent research lines: Optical Character Recognition, Digital Scientific Editions, Digital Archives and Libraries.

The first research line aims at the creation of an OCR model useful for the automatic transcription of the corpus, reliable and potentially expandable to all texts printed with the same set of italic characters which derive from those created by Aldus Manutius.

The second research line aims to set up the digital scientific edition of the corpus with the creation of a hypertext structured on multiple levels.

Finally, the third line aims at the creation of a digital library of the corpus, which brings together the individual digital scientific editions, by integrating them with paratextual data of a various nature, enabling different types of visualization and interrogation.

TRISDE51 entails the scholarly digital edition of the illustrations in Cgm 51, the oldest witness of Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan.

As in a graphic novel, the text is complemented by full-page illustrations, enriched with stratified inscriptions added by different hands over time.
The traditional editorial approach is not suitable to represent the multimodal nature of the document, while the digital model can offer adequate answers for the critical representation of its complexity.
The workflow involves, first of all, a codicological-palaeographic evaluation of the manuscript, also with the help of analysis techniques such as multispectral imaging.
Illustrations and captions will be classified according to a set grammar and put in relation with the texts on the basis of analogies or discrepancies.
Categories from textual criticism will be applied to the visual parts to classify variants or errors.
Texts and images (annotated according to TEI XML standards) will be edited alongside each other so that the user can easily visualize their relationships.
This will require the creation of visualization software able to integrate the IIIF images (currently available in the library’s catalogue at [https://bildsuche.digitale-sammlungen.de/index.html?c=suche_sim&bandnummer=bsb00088332&pimage=00001&einzelsegmentsuche=1&einzelsegment=&l=de) and a TEI transcription. TRISDE51 gathers scholars in the fields of philology, manuscript studies and digital humanities. The document represents a remarkable case study on how to digitally handle multimodal objects.

The pilot phase of TRISDE51 was launched during a university course (“Introduction to Germanic Philology”, BA Languages and Cultures for Publishing, University of Verona, 2016-2017) as a testing ground for academic cooperation.
The class was involved in the entire workflow and trained to consider the digital humanities approach to cultural heritage as a completely new way to promote and interpret cultural objects.

TRISDE51 spans the duration of the Excellence Project and it also benefits from a departmental research allowance (July 2018-June 2019, winner: Dr. Anna Cappellotto) and funding (€ 53,814.33, September 2019-August 2021) from the University of Verona, won on a selective basis (2017 basic research call for bids).