Technical problems all fixed…now I can blog!

A quick update on the Villani Project lest anyone presume that it has fallen into oblivion. As of the middle of last week Rala and I posted our complete encoding of Book 13 of Villani’s Cronica to the server.

When we began this project we encoded a handful of themes and a little bit of information about persons named in the Cronica. Over the course of the year we simultaneously narrowed and simplified our method of encoding themes, broadened our treatment of persons, and encoded new information about textual objects (places, buildings, offices, peoples, family names) and textual structure (citations of various sorts, Villani’s “moralizing” interventions in the narrative, etc).
Undoubtedly we will be “tweaking” our encoding and, in time, adding still new categories so we would really appreciate any comments participants might have on the encoding as it stands now–especially on the encoding of “themes”.

Now the bulk of our effort shifts to the annotation and, to a lesser extent, the translation of the text. Rala and I will be “tele-meeting” this week to divide up the annotation work.

That’s all for now!