Search Engine
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.
I see from Massimo’s post that my earlier one wasn’t very clear. What I meant by being able to pull the text out of the commentary was that it would be interesting to pull Dante’s text out of Boccaccio’s commentary in the Esp. This would be possible (I think) if Dante’s text were marked as such, since there’s hardly a single word in all the commented cantos that doesn’t appear in the Esp. To my knowledge, the only time B skips something it’s just an accident.
I agree wholeheartedly that we should keep intertext searching as one of our principal priorities. There’s no doubt about that, especially since the VHL was born with this possibility in mind. Things that would be particularly interesting in this regard would be historical personages, quotations (esp. Biblical and philosophical), clear sources and even occasionally places. It would be great eventually to have a structure for all the VHL’s texts that provides cross-searching (on the model, say, of searches across various giornate in the Dweb’s old search functions). Regarding sources, for example, it would be quite remarkable to follow the use of someone like Valerius Maximus or Cicero across these texts.
And, along these lines, wouldn’t it be fantastic to add in a future grant (if there is one) something like Petrarca’s Rerum Memorandorum? Or even Salutati’s Epistles? The groundwork we lay here will serve us extremely well as we move forward.
M