Thanks to Ethan Fremen’s help in setting up our versioning system, we have started work on the Esposizioni. At the moment, our list of points to focus on includes the following:

• basic structural elements, such as chapter divisions, the divisions between literal and allegorical exposition in each chapter, paragraphs and milestones (following the numeration established in the critical edition);
• proper names, along with contextual information about the people, places and entities they represent;
• citations from other authors quoted by Boccaccio and notes as to the erroneous nature of some of these citations (with information about their authors and the works in which they appear – in some cases, the quotation is anonymous, and we have found that these tend to be either proverbial sayings or Boccaccian constructions intended to give personal statements a more general import);
• Greek and Latin terms and their meanings, to be indexed;
• the many terms, Italian as well as foreign, that Boccaccio treats as lemmas, explaining their meaning in detail to his audience, and the definitions themselves; these lemmae will also be indexed, and the glosses cross-referenced to them – particularly useful in cases where Boccaccio defines terms more than once;
• rhetorical devices explicitly and implicitly used by Boccaccio;
• the complex rhetorical structure that Boccaccio lays out every so often, and whether he follows through;
• digressions, in which Boccaccio stops addressing Dante’s text directly and spends, at times, entire pages addressing a broad topic of interest to him (for example, poetry)

Guyda has agreed to tackle Boccaccio’s citations of other authors. Roberto has started on the encoding of terms for the index. Cristiana is researching and annotating Boccaccio’s rhetorical devices, as well as the highly irregular rhetorical structure of the work. The main focus right now are the Accessus and the two expositions of Canto I.

What’re we missing? Are there other elements of the work that will be absolutely necessary to encode on a first pass, that are missing from the above bulleted list? What about a wish list, things we could keep in mind for encoding in the future?