I am pleased to announce that there is now stuff to play with.

A part of the Esposizioni, the part that has been most thoroughly encoded so far, has been put up. From this rather large chunk (I’m guessing roughly 175 modern print pages), we have built an index of people’s names. Now, this index must be verified, and we need your enthusiastic help.

Not many people besides the project’s participants read this blog, so on Monday I’ll compose an email to be sent out (with modifications as you see fit) to various pertinent mailing lists. I’ll be happy to send it out to Humanist and Digital Medievalist lists. Anyone else willing to forward it along to colleagues or lists? If so, would you please let me/us know which lists you’re going to cover?

The project’s current status is critically important for a smooth interaction with it. For the moment, most of VHL’s stuff (everything except for this weblog and a discussion forum, about which below) currently lives on the development server of the Scholarly Technology Group here at Brown. It is very much a work in progress. At any time, it may simply not work, or work in unexpected ways. If you’re really lucky (?), you could happen upon a moment when one of us is working on the site, and the same page loaded twice a minute apart could well be completely different the second time around!

Believe it or not, however, this isn’t the most exciting part. The exciting part is this (n.b.: don’t use Internet Explorer to look at these):

• The Esposizioni table of contents; click on a chapter to see it. Note, when viewing the text, that some terms are highlighted: proper names in blue, themes that we have begun to encode in pink, and words or phrases that Boccaccio regards as terms, and defines, in green. Hovering over a highlighted segment of text reveals more information about it. (For now, this information is in rudimentary form. We’ll be working on that.)
• Indexes -> Esposizioni: People. The only index we have finished thus far. If you are interested in contributing verifications, additions or corrections for the entries in that index, we would welcome your contribution. You can click on any one of them to see a page of paragraphs in which a given entry appears. There are instructions on the main index page as well as on the index entry matches page; they explain how to contribute using the
• discussion forum. Regardless of whether you participate in work on the Index, if you would like to discuss other ideas about the Esposizioni or the way our project is working out so far, please let us know by starting a discussion!

Please note: the annotation engine, built by Paul Caton, is not quite ready for use yet, and we will not be using it for verifying the index. When it’s ready, we would like for the annotators with sufficient access privileges to focus on their individual research, or that done with a small group of people on a specific issue. It would be beneficial for projects being researched by a larger group to be discussed on the forum, so as to alert the public and perhaps increase the level of interest and participation.

Thoughts?