The documents of the abbey S. Maria della Grotta of Vitulano (BN): 1200-1250 - UNINA

L’edizione digitale delle fonti documentarie del Medioevo
Naples, 31 May 2018

The documents of the abbey
S. Maria della Grotta of Vitulano (BN):
1200-1250
         A Scholarly Digital Edition

                      Antonella Ambrosio – Vera Schwarz-Ricci
                      Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II

Edition of the S. Maria della Grotta parchments:
 1200-1250

The Monasterium Italy group, coordinated by Antonella Ambrosio, is
dealing with the Italian legal documentation, in particular with the
edition, encoding and processing for research purposes of mediaeval
documents in Campania.
• idea: Antonella Ambrosio
• coordination: A. Ambrosio, G. Vogeler, V. Schwarz-Ricci
• editions: Antonella Ambrosio, Giovanni Araldi, Maria Rosaria
  Falcone, Paola Massa, Vera Schwarz-Ricci, Maria Elisabetta
  Vendemia, Georg Vogeler
• cooperation: Hans Clausen (University of Graz)

Institutional Support
•   Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Dipartimento di
    Studi Umanistici
•   International Centre for Archival Research (ICARUS), Vienna
•   University of Graz
•   University of Cologne (Cologne Center for eHumanities)

  Financing
• EnarC - The European Network on Archival Cooperation (EU,
  Culture Programme 2007-2013)
• co:op – community as opportunity. the creative archives’ and
  users’ network (EU, Creative Europe 2014-2020)
• university funding UNINA

Digital critical editions of
documents: some examples

Our aims
• A digital critical edition for scholars without specific
  encoding training
• An edition as cooperation of scholars with different
  backgrounds: collaborative edition
• An accessible edition
• A dynamic edition open to further elaboration and to
  contributions of other scholars (crowdsourcing)
• A stable product, recognised in academic circles: paper
  edition with ISBN

 First experimentation of the editorial tool of
 Monasterium.Net

Our two starting points

• paper edition of the
  charters of the 11°-12°
  centuries of S. Maria della
  Grotta

• digitised parchments fonds
  of the Biblioteca della
  Società napoletana di Storia
  Patria on Monasterium.Net

S. Maria della Grotta (Vitulano)

Library of the Society for
Neapolitan History

Charters of
S. Maria della Grotta

Our proceeding

• creation of a collection with the parchments
 private virtual working environment with customized tools
with:
• high-quality digital reproductions of the charter (recto and
  verso)
• possibility to edit and annotate images
• creation of image clippings for further comparative analysis
• user-friendly text editor
• preview
• possibility to share charters with other users (social editing)

Essential preview

Two questions

1. Why the effort? Why don’t we use a word
   processor and disseminate a pdf?

2. Where’s the critical edition? Or, in other words,
   where are the footnotes?

Background: XML
• Extensible Markup Language (XML): a markup language
  that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a
  format that is both human-readable and machine-
  readable
• => text is enriched with “annotations” which formalize
  the structure of the text

A. Cappelli, Dizionario di abbreviature latine ed italiane

A. Cappelli, Dizionario di
abbreviature latine ed italiane

Encoding standards
Standards in XML-Encoding guarantee generality and
usability across the internet – and long term preservation
• For encoding of textual data in Digital Humanities:
• TEI – Text Encoding Initiative
• For encoding of charters:
• CEI – Charter Encoding Initiative

 Monasterium:
In nomine Domini.
Ego Petrus iudex.

Where’s the critical edition?
• Critical apparatus with palaeographical and philological
  observations of the editor, textual reconstruction
 dedicated tags:

• , e.g. with further specification of the extent or
  the agent
•  with further description of the type
•  with indication of the hand
• : free space with indication of the extent

An example: cei:supplied

quod dicebat aviam suam deposuisse penes ipssam
ecclesiam

    quod dicebat aviam suam deposuisse penes
    ipssam ecclesia(m)a ...
    a Om.   il segno abbr. per la lettera nasale.

From XML into ... a traditional
edition
How to transform the digital edition in Monasterium in a
traditional edition?

Extensible Stylesheet Language – Formatting Objects

1. XSL-FO conversion of the XML => XML/FO File
2. XML/FO File transformed into PDF (with a FO-
   Processor)

Example 1

41201 ottobre

Example 2
• quod dicebat aviam suam deposuisse penes ipssam
  ecclesia m

• quod dicebat aviam suam deposuisse penes ipssam
  ecclesiamf

…

Lost in Transmedialisation?

• social edition: necessity of procedures,
  homogenisation
• transformation process: necessity of
  protocolls, mapping
• transformation process: national imprint,
  compromises

Other useful tools

1. Annotation Tool
2. Image elaboration
3. Geotool

Annotation tool

Image clippings and processing

The importance of digital editions

for the valorisation of the Italian parchment
           heritage before 1300

Encoding model:
 some diplomatistic elements
• Dispositio
  
• Clausole
   con attributo di specificazione
• Dichiarazione notarile con Dichiarazione notarile_segno grafico a chiusura
  con Dichiarazione notarile_causa della dichiarazione del notaio
   con attributo di specificazione
• Autocorrezione
   con attributo di specificazione
• Sottoscrizione/i_nome_titoli

Encoding model:
some elements for historical analysis

     Toponimo/i e Microtoponimo/i
           
     Altra/e persona/e_ patronimico- provenienza- funzione
           
     Ente ecclesiastico e Ente ecclesiastico_luogo
           
     Dato economico [in natura o in denaro]

Conclusioni

     Big data of the Past:
    Vision or near future?