Last Friday Massimo, Rala, Matt and I met to talk about the Villani project. Here are a couple of notes from that meeting:

1. The encoding is well under way, and Matt and Rala think they can finish it (complete with corrections) by the end of this month. They agreed to email me once they’re done with the first pass of encoding and corrections, hopefully sometime this week, so that we can go over them together and tweak as needed.

2. Annotation: when we do get to it, Rala and Matt expressed interest in encoding people, places and historical events. Naturally, we won’t limit the Villani annotation to these three topics, but they’re quite large enough to keep our consultants and any annotators busy for a while!

3. Matt and Rala will come up with a list of potential annotators whom we might contact. If anyone else has a potential lead for involvement, by all means, comment here or email me (vika-wordsend-org).

4. We’re thinking of conferences that might be useful for presentations and feedback. Anyone have ideas for conferences or other meetings as regards this project specifically, as opposed to the larger VHL? (Kalamazoo/Leeds are two obvious choices, but it never hurts to have more venues.)

5. The question of cross-referencing Villani with other online projects (such as Pico, Catasto and Tratte) remains open and subject to our having time and resources for it.