ABSTRACT

This contribution aims at illustrating the ongoing work towards the digital scholarly editing, long-term preservation, web publishing and computational exploiting of 41 letters, written by the renowned composer Vincenzo Bellini. The correspondence is kept at the Belliniano Civic Museum of Catania and it is being encoded in XML according to the last TEI guidelines. The edition will be made accessible both via web - exploiting the Edition Visualization Technology (EVT)

http://evt.labcd.unipi.it/

(Rosselli Del Turco and Di Pietro, 2016) - as well as integrated into an interactive and multimedia tour within the museum (Del Grosso et al., 2018). The digital edition is based on the recently published transcriptions made by Seminara (Bellini, 2017). The encoding scheme has been defined according to the edition requirements (Bozzi, 2014), the TEI best practices (Pierazzo, 2015) and the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) guidelines - where the musical context must be specified (Figure 1).

No letters preserved in the Belliniano Civic Museum contain fragments of musical compositions. MEI guidelines have only been exploited to encode the person role in the musical context (librettist, tenore, etc.) which occurs in the text.

Our initiative has some elements of innovation that distinguish it from similar projects, such as the Van Gogh letter project

http://vangoghletters.org /

or the DALF project

http://ctb.kantl.be/project/dalf/

. For instance, we encode the circumstance that the letters themselves have also the purpose of acting as envelopes (Figure 2). In fact, they are folded on themselves and postmarks and wax seals are sometimes affixed on them. The edition takes care of handling the correspondence metadata by means of the correspDesc TEI tagset

http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/it/html/ref-correspDesc.html

(Stadler et al., 2016), thus providing the opportunity to exploit the correspSearch API

https://correspsearch.net/index.xql?id=api&l=en

(Neuber, 2016). This approach has allowed us to enrich the encoding of the document both in its logical and physical structure and in indexing letters by sender, recipient, date, and places (Figure 3).

The museum context and the educational purposes have even led us to the definitions of some lists of named entities . Within these resources we have adopted the Semantic Web and LOD paradigm by encoding external references to authoritative repositories such as RISM

https://opac.rism.info/index.php?id=8&L=1#c116 /

and DBpedia.

Finally, we implemented some useful EVT extensions to automatically handle hotspots and to show critical notes that accompany the text

http://licodemo.ilc.cnr.it/bellini-in-rete

(Figure 4).

Bibliographic entry for Pirata Opera with MEI elements encoding the composer and librettist. Bibliographic entry for Pirata Opera with MEI elements encoding the composer and librettist.

Enveloping of letter n. LL1.4. Figure . Enveloping of letter n. LL1.4.

The correspDesc tagset adopted to encode LL1.16 letter. Figure . The correspDesc tagset adopted to encode LL1.16 letter.

Image hotspots and text notes. Figure . Image hotspots and text notes.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was partially supported by the “Patto per Catania” under the “Fondo Sviluppo e Coesione 2014-2020: Piano per il Mezzogiorno”.

REFERENCES

Bellini, V., 2017. Carteggio. Leo S. Olschki.

Bozzi, A., 2014. Computer-assisted Scholarly Editing of Manuscript Sources, in: Davidhazi, P. (Ed.), New Publication Cultures in the Humanities: Exploring the Paradigm Shift. Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, pp. 99–115.

Del Grosso, A.M., Spampinato, D., Cristofaro, S., De Luca, M.R., Giovannetti, E., Marchi, S., Seminara, G., 2018. Le lettere di Bellini: dalla Carta al Web, in: AIUCD 2018 - Book of abstracts. pp. 60–64. https://doi.org/10.6092/unibo/amsacta/5997

Neuber, F., 2016. correspSearch, in: Variants. European Society for Textual Scholarship, pp. 284–285.

Pierazzo, E., 2015. Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories, Models and Methods, Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities. Ashgate, Farnham Surrey.

Rosselli Del Turco, R., Di Pietro, C., 2016. Between innovation and conservation: the narrow path of UI design for the DSE, in: Digital Scholarly Editions as Interfaces. Presented at the Digital Scholarly Editions as Interfaces, University of Graz, Graz, pp. 133–163.

Stadler, P., Illetschko, M., Seifert, S., 2016. Towards a Model for Encoding Correspondence in the TEI: Developing and Implementing <correspDesc>. Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative 9. https://doi.org/10.4000/jtei.1742