Bellini’s Correspondence: a Digital Scholarly Edition for a Multimedia Museum

Abstract

Within the “Museo Virtuale della Musica BellinInRete” project, a corpus of letters, written by the renowned composer Vincenzo Bellini (1801 - 1835) from Catania, will be encoded and made publicly available. This contribution aims at illustrating the part of the project regarding the implementation of the prototype for the metadata and text encoding, indexing and visualisation of Bellini’s correspondence. The encoding scheme has been defined according to the latest guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative and it has been instantiated on a sample of letters. Contextually, a first environment has been implemented by customizing two open source tools: Edition Visualization Technology and Omega Scholarly platform. The main objective of the digital edition is to engage general public with the cultural heritage held by the Belliniano Civic Museum of Catania. This wide access to Bellini’s correspondence has been conceived preserving the scholarly transcriptions of the letters edited by Seminara within her most recent critical edition (Olschki, 2017). The digital edition of the corpus takes care of handling the correspondence metadata by means of the correspDesc TEI tagset. Finally, Bellini's letters will be accessible via the Web platform as well as integrated into a forthcoming interactive and multimedia tour hosted at the museum.