Umanistica Digitale

Intratestualità e digitale: prospettive esegetiche sulla ‘nuova’ filologia dantesca

Itala Tambasco — 2023-01-04

The external architecture of the Comedy reproduces a signal of its internal geometry, made up of textual references that the ancient exegetes could only guess and sometimes detect, on the basis of a good memory (visual and musical) and a marked synaptic-linguistic sensitivity.

The digitization of manuscript texts and the increase of databases and literary applications (The Dartmouth Dante Project and Dante Lab are just a few examples) have literally oriented the 'new' exegetical disposition towards Dante’s text. The possibility of simultaneously carrying out textual searches within the poem has made intratextuality an almost essential element of modern lecturae, increasingly oriented towards the search for a unitary and organic interpretation of the songs of the Comedy that communicate their more exact meaning in relationships which they entertain with the whole of Dante's writing, sometimes going beyond the boundaries of the poem itself. We cannot consider it accidental that the rampant intratextual attitude of Dante's critics - which we place chronologically at the end of the 90s and the beginning of the new millennium - coincided with the flowering of digital humanities and represents the essential consequence of the modern exegetical approach. to Dante's text.

Are we all Bédierian? Perspectives for Digital Genetic Editions

Beatrice Nava — 2023-01-04

The current scene of Digital Scholarly Editions, particularly those concerning modern manuscripts, registers a trend towards documentary and diplomatic editions. This “bédierian” tendence leads to editions focused mainly on the diplomatic transcription of the source, lacking in consideration about the genetic process. Lying under this situation we could figure out the existence of digital tools and languages more adequate to this documentary approach. In addition to that, this article is aimed at showing the concrete problems in representing the diachronic elaboration of the text in a digital form, through methodological considerations and examples of realisation. Despite the widespread trend and the difficulty in choosing a different way, it seems possible to reflect on genetic digital editions from an optimistic perspective. In fact, these editions are not only necessary, at least for certain textual situations, but also feasible, as shown by some ongoing projects and experiments (Saba 2021, VaSto 2022 and Il Conte di Carmagnola), presented at the end of the contribution.

From paper to screen. Mapping some problematic nodes in the reading debate

Marco Tognini — 2023-01-04

New media are changing the literary sphere in various ways. In this article I want to focus on the dimension of literary reading. My aim is to map some stances around critical points in the debate about the potential effects of the transition from reading on paper to reading on screen. In particular, I want to consider the physical-sensorious dimension of reading, the issue of immersion and the matter of attention. Without any claim of completeness, I would like to draw some guidelines about relevant key points in such a complex debate. In the end of the article, I will notice that the “problem of reading” calls into question political issues.

RePIM in LOD: semantic technologies to manage, preserve, and disseminate knowledge about Italian secular music and lyric poetry from the 16th-17th centuries

Paolo Bonora — 2023-01-04

The PIM in LOD project aimed to publish the "Repertorio della Poesia Italiana in Musica, 1500-1700" (RePIM) as Linked Open Data (LOD) dataset. For the extent and detail of its contents, RePIM is a reference archive for research on Italian secular music from the 16th-17th centuries. In recent years, scholars have been able to access it through a public web-based application. Due to the obsolescence of its information technology platform, the RePIM repository was set to be taken offline. To preserve this precious source, the project migrated its contents into a knowledge base (KB) adopting semantic technologies and designed an up-to-date end-user application. The paper illustrates the challenges of managing information about madrigal tradition and the digital knowledge preservation of bibliographic and philological information in the field of Italian secular music and lyric poetry of the 16th-17th centuries.

The phraseology of international disarmament treaties: the DITTO terminology resource

Federica Vezzani — 2023-01-04

This study aims at examining the phraseology of international disarmament treaties, through a comparative French-Italian case study, in a complementary perspective with a previous study on the terminology of this domain. The legal effectiveness of international disarmament treaties, as well as international efforts towards general and complete disarmament under international control, are subject to the consent of States to be bound by these treaties. Consequently, difficulties in the translation processes required in a multilingual and multicultural environment, such as that of international cooperation, cannot by any means hinder the application of international disarmament provisions. Furthermore, despite the high relevance and the strong impact they produce on international peace and security, the domain of disarmament still remains unexplored in the French-Italian language combination.

Consequently, this study focuses on the phraseology of the legal language of disarmament treaties, in an attempt to fill the existing gaps in literature and to ensure their legal effectiveness also through the specificity and accuracy of their linguistic expression. The proposed methodological approach consists of three steps: 1) the analysis of the linguistic and conceptual dimension of the disarmament domain, in a bilingual perspective; 2) the implementation of a new specialised terminological resource on disarmament, named DITTO (Disarmament International Treaties TerminOlogy), freely accessible for consultation; 3) a translation exercise of the main international disarmament treaties for methodological validation purposes.

Tourism Translation: from Corpus to Machine Translation (and back)

Patrizia Giampieri — 2023-01-11

Tourism language is characterised by features which make it distinct from other sector-based or technical languages. There are many examples of corpus-based studies and corpus-driven translation in the tourism sector but little regarding machine translation. Fewer still are the case studies or research papers dedicated to a comparison between machine-translated and corpus-based translated tourism texts. This paper aims to fill this gap by investigating whether, and to what extent, Google machine translation (from Italian into English) of a variety of tourism texts can be considered reliable or, at least, acceptable. To this end, it compares machine translations of tourism texts to their respective corpus-based translations. The paper’s findings uncover issues which mostly concern lexical and collocational choices, as well as a neglect of certain English writing conventions, such as those relating to clause structures, ego-targeting and figurative language. MT appears to perform well with informative and descriptive tourism texts, where sentences are simpler and no vivid language is involved. These, however, could hardly be considered representative of tourism texts, as a whole. The paper calls for advancements in MT algorithms in order to address certain lexical and collocational issues. Moreover, it is the opinion of the authors that MT in the tourism field is best left to translators capable of discerning accurate word usage in context.

Web and Social Media as new Sources for History

Stefano Allegrezza — 2023-01-04

This paper aims at highlighting how interest in the issues of web and social media archiving and preservation has grown enormously, in parallel with the awareness of the importance of these ‘resources’ as privileged sources for reconstructing the history of our era. How will the historians of the future be able to reconstruct the historical period we are living through if memory institutions are not able to archive and preserve the websites and social media of institutions, public bodies, parties, associations, government bodies, political figures, and famous people in general, given that everything is now conveyed through these channels? The fragility of the web, then, would require immediate action and the launch of ‘web and social media archiving’ initiatives without delay, on pain of the disappearance of all that has been made available online in recent years, but on this point the situation in Italy - with a few exceptions - appears to lag far behind other European countries and enormously behind the Anglo-Saxon countries. There is therefore an urgent need to launch initiatives to raise awareness on these issues and to train the skills and professionalism required to conduct web and social media archiving and preservation projects.

Historical Network Analysis and Htr tools for a digital methodological historical approach to the Biscari Archive of Catania

Salvatore Spina — 2023-01-12

The Paternò Castello (Princes of Biscari) Archive, preserved at the State Archive of Catania – amongst one of the most crucial family archives – is of the complex historical heritage that can lead historians to write the history of Catania, of his actors and how the latter determined the cultural structure of the city. Most scholars, however, have never managed to exhaust all the questions and answers. Today, the digital methodological perspective and its ITC tools, such as Handwritten Text Recognition (Transkribus), Historical Network Analysis, and web-based tools such as Keyphrase-Digger open up new historical paths. Upgrading archival sources to their digital version will allow “quantitative-qualitative” research that would shed new light on historical actors and events, networks and resources of the history of Catania and the Two Sicilies.

The Extended Digital Scholarly Edition of “The Name of the Rose”: modelling, workflow and the IDEA paradigm

Christian D'Agata — 2023-01-04

The paper presents the Digital Scholarly Edition of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose characterized since its conception by the dialogue between Digital Philology and Computational Literary Criticism in a interdisciplinary perspective called 'IDEA' paradigm (Interpretation, Didactics, Edition, Annotation). By bringing together Authorial Philology, Digital Annotation and Literature Didactics, the IDEA paradigm aims to overcome the objective limitations of publishing contemporary literature content on the Web in open format. The contribution then describes the portal «The Variants of the Rose», a virtual place where to present the critical apparatus of variants encoded in XML-TEI (and visualized through EVT2), some didactic content elaborated with TRAViz, Storymap JS and Timeline JS, the annotation in a Domain Specific Language developed on Euporia and further critical insights elaborated from Franco Moretti's Distant reading and Giuseppe Savoca's Literary Lexicography. Subsequently, a reflection on the modelling of edition, the concept of Extended Edition and the project workflow is presented. Finally, a road map of future content is proposed with a view to the increasing integration of scientific research and the Public Humanities.

Review: M. Riva. 2022. Shadow Plays: virtual realities in an Analog World. Stanford University Press

Alessandra Di Tella — 2023-01-04

Shadow Plays: virtual realities in an Analog World, Massimo Riva's digital monograph, is published by Stanford University Press in the series dedicated to digital projects. The monograph deals with the optical devices of nineteenth-twentieth century Italy, and how the first immersive experiences contributed to modify some historical-cultural and artistic-literary aspects of our country. Moreover, Riva argues that the analog “virtual experiences” examined represent the progenitors of today's virtual and augmented reality experiences. This contribution examines Shadow Plays as an example of a digital monograph, in which content and “container” are inseparable and equally functional to the success of the research output.