Upon thinking further about the search functions for the Villani text, I was wondering/hoping that our encoding would allow us to make searches that involve those encoded elements. Simple string searches may currently be done on the OVI database, where Villani’s Nuova Cronica also resides. Will we be able to search for occurrences of Person/gender/female within the same paragraph with the word “Francia”, or examples of Person / position / priore in close proximity to Theme / econ? Will this open up a world of complexity that will cause the program to crash, or is this exactly what we are aiming for?

As we look more closely at the Villani encoding, we are looking to clean up and simplify as much as possible. Some series of attributes are naturally infinite, such as the names of persons or names of places. On the other hand, we have one set of attributes “natura”, under type=”forza”, under the element “theme”. They are as follows:

Giustizia, forca, Condanna, Multa confinamento, Prigione, Guerra, Guerra esilio, ribellione, attacco, Assalto, Confiscazione, Mutilazione, Incendio, Assassinio, presa citta, Guerra presa citta, Congiuro, Arresto tortura, Assissinio mutilamento, Assassinio, Mutilamento cannabalismo, Esilio, Guerra presacastello, Assassinio, Blocco, Guerra, Assedio, Ostaggio, Assedio, Ribellione Guerra, Condanna esilio, Scomunica, Tortura forca, Mutilamento, Confinamento, Furto, Tortura multa, ribellione, Guerra cattura, Presacitta, Presacastello, Giustizia, Confina, Forca cattura, forca condanna

Would it be helpful or not helpful to combine these into groupings? Groupings like punizione civile, punizione ecclesiastico, guerra, for example. Would that add unneccesary complexity? Or would it be best to leave these forms of force in their original wordings as we did with the person: “name” attributes, and give up trying to classify them.

I imagine a sort of grim catalogue of violence, and index of evils that could be drawn from this encoding. Villani has his spicy side too. Any suggestions welcome.

I’ve been working on Boccaccio’s citations of other literary sources in the Esposizioni, and was wondering how we were going to incorporate them into the online text. How about if I add the references to sources in as annotations to the section of the text that we have up now (Esp., Acc., I-IV)? I thought I would simply add the references as they appear in Padoan’s notes to the Mondadori edition (Milan, 1965), and then others more erudite can come after me and make further comments or corrections. Or would it be better to wait and encode them instead?

I agree with Mike that the Balzac example is an interesting one, although it clearly applies to a corpus (oeuvre) by a single author. From this point of view, let’s remember that VHL is not a “single author” project - I find more affinities with the WWP or the EEBO. Of course, the search engine is a valuable tool for annotating. However, what our search engine should be able to do, eventually, is to maximize the possibilities embedded in our “differentiated” encoding. For example: crossreferencing names, places, dates, visualizing text strings and paragraphs etc., but also allowing to perform more sophisticated searches for authorial, thematic, semantic/rhetorical structures as we identify and encode them in the various texts (what fields would be appropriate for these other tasks?). Our goal is to enable a comparative and explorative approach to texts that belong to the same cultural context but also to different typologies of writing and rhetorical genres (we have chosen these texts precisely because of the wide spectrum they represent). How does the search engine help us reach that goal? Another question raised by Mike: keeping commentary and text separated is ok, but isn’t encoding a form of embedded commentary? Does Mike mean annotations? Will we be able to search annotations as well - in relation to text - once we have a significant amount of annotations? I suppose we can proceed by stages and add functionality and power to our engine as we progress in the encoding and annotating process. However, in designing it, one of the fundamental prerequisites we should keep in mind is its “expandibility” - to keep it open to the possibilities that lie ahead of us, including potential applications in the seminar room.

1) There is a paragraph broken in two: lines 4645-47. This paragraph should be unified.

2) Line 4713. As far as I know, Costanza d’Altavilla was not the daughter of Guglielmo di Sicilia. She was daughter of Ruggero II and mother of Federico II. Also in other cases Boccaccio makes mistakes of this sort, but I guess this kind of problems will be dealt with when annotation begins.

Roberto Bacci

Anticipating Paul’s work on the search engine, a question for the text scholars:

What do you want a semantic search engine operating on a text to do for you?

Please have one or more texts in mind, regardless of whether they’re texts we’re putting up or those that interest you personally. The functionality, however, should be generalized. (For example: want to search for words in proximity to each other. How much proximity? Occurring within 3/5/10/? words of each other. Or: want to search for words with similar spellings, like love and lov’d and loves.

Examples of search engines for various corpora can be found here. The features you want may or may not be available on them, and you are certainly not limited to what you see – this is just to get you going.