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Although EVT has slowly evolved into a versatile and powerful tool for publishing historical sources and literary texts on the basis of the XML/TEI format, none of the modifications - and periodic rewrites - of its code base has significantly changed the way in which edition data is handled. Even today, in fact, the main goal is to visualise and navigate such data, no doubt in a sophisticated way (support for multiple edition levels, support for named entities management, text-image linking), but in any case limited to what we might call “core functionalities” of a DSE. Texts encoded in XML/TEI, on the other hand, are a potential treasure trove of information just waiting to be interrogated and made available to the user. In this article I identify three use cases – the processing of special characters encoded by means of the and elements; the management of named entities, realia and other interesting elements of the text; the use of ontologies within an XML/TEI document – related to literary texts in Old English in order to propose a TEI encoding and a subsequent processing able to put the user in a position to receive answers to complex, transversal queries involving cross-links between different types of elements.

The webinar “Medieval archival sources in the digital world. The challenge of treating and visualizing semi-structured data”, organized by the Digital Culture Laboratory (UNIPI) and by the Engineering Historical Memory project. This thematic dossier aims to offer a brief account of the results of the workshop, with particular attention to future collaborations and experimentations in the field of processing and extracting information from semi-structured editions of archival documents. These advanced features are essential to broaden the use of digital editions of archival sources and other written documents, making them more flexible and open to research tools. The central problem concerns the relationship between text coding and the creation of good interfaces, to which the user can accessintuitively.

The paper presents the potential means of utilizing digital edition tools by retracing the process of the Codice Pelavicino digital edition. We will also explore the related issues of coding, output, easiness of use, relationship with users. The paper presents the reworking of a lecture presented at the webinar “Medieval archival sources in digital environment. The challenge of processing and visualizing semi-structured data ", organized on 22-23 June 2020 by the Digital Culture Laboratory (University of Pisa) and by the head of the Engineering Historical Memory project. The aim is to promote future collaboration and experimentation initiatives in the field of processing and extraction of information from semi-structured editions of archival documents.

This contribution explores the world of digital critical editions by proposing reflections on the methodology that can be used for their production. The first part analyses the positions of various scholars on the digital critical edition and its definition. In particular, the relationship between digital critical edition and digital scholarly edition is explored. The criteria used to build Sahle's and Franzini's catalogues help to understand both the concept of digital scholarly edition and the state of the art of digital critical editions in the classical context. Subsequently, the constituent elements of the digital edition are taken into consideration and how they can be integrated with the critical edition method. Elements such as the choice of mark-up language and tools for creating an interface in relation to the text are an integral part of the digital critical edition process. For this reason, they need a thorough reflection on their characteristics and their use. Finally, we focus on the potential of the digital critical edition and how it differs from the printed critical edition, proposing new ways of transmission and scientific communication of philological work, starting from the critical apparatus to the use of images as components of the editions and the possibility of collaborative editions.

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.

TRANSSCRIPT is a four-year international project co-founded by French ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche) and Luxembourgish FNR (Fonds National de la Recherche). The main purpose of TRANSSCRIPT is to explore late-medieval writing practices by combining two fields of study: the governance of the medieval states at the regional level and cultural transfers between regions straddling two sides of a linguistic border. TRANSSCRIPT compares two territorial principalities, the duchy of Lorraine and the county/duchy of Luxembourg between 13th and 16th century. The francophone database consists of charter texts and metadata, regestes and comments in French; in addition, the TRANSSCRIPT database will allow semantic and linguistic studies on Latin and on vernacular languages (French, German).