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?

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

During the last week of encoding, I have been dealing with a bunch of “double names” (or even “triple names”). The typical example is a character that had (fairly accurate) equivalents in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, and then sometimes a “third” name in medieval Christianity. A fex examples will make this point clearer: Medusa-Gorgone, Furie-Eumenidi, Parche-Fate-Fato etc. In these cases, for the glosses, we employ the tool seealso=”", which could be useful for names as well.
Roberto Bacci

Thank you Mike for the encouraging words. I wish to signal two more changes to be done in the first chunk of the esposizioni to make it consistent with the second chunk (the part I am currently working on):
- Encode “Figliuolo” (usually capitalized) when it is referred to Jesus Christ: nameref=”figlioulo” reg=”gesucristo”. I think “Figliuolo” has not been encoded at all in the first chunk.
- “Etiocle”: the most used modern Italian version for the name of this character (the brother of Polinice) is “Eteocle”. Thus we must change all the “Etiocle”s in the first chunk into “Eteocle”s.
Roberto Bacci

I am encoding the second chunk of the Esposizioni. When the two chunks will be put together, we must remember to do the following:
- in the first chunk, change “Orco” from “place” to “mythentity” as it can mean both “inferno” and “Plutone”.
- make sure that all the terms for “angelo” “arcangelo” “demone” and their variations (”angiolo” etc.) - so, basically, all the terms for “devil” and angel”, also in the SINGULAR - are encoded in the first chunk. I have been consistent in encoding them in the second chunk, but now I have realized I might not have encoded all the occurrences in the first chunk. Terms like that, generic and singular, are more important in the second chunk than in the first. That is why I have decided to encode them, but we must check the consistency in the first chunk.
- All the “Oceano” occurrences must be checked with attention. Myth-entity or place? It seems to depend on the context. Furthermore, there are many “Oceano”s: Oceano orientale, atlantico, etiopico etc.
- Both pagan divinities (”Venere”, “Giove” etc.) and Christian saints (”Santa Lucia” etc) can be also temples and churches, thus not only “persons” (mythical or not) but also “places”.
- I agree with Mike on the names of the planets: they should not be considered as possible destinations, even though A. Warburg wrote an essay on this topic, and the idea of “astronaut” was not unknown in tha Middle Ages (most of Warburg’s examples are from the early Renaissance, but with medieval antecedents).
- In the second chunk, the whole part dealing with “Plutone” is particularly messy and unclear (for example: there are many references to what I have labeled as “mythentities”, Sicilian mountains that are also Greek gods etc.) Thus, when the time comes, please read it and double check my encoding with particular attention.
Ok, I think it is all for now.
Roberto Bacci

Yesterday, Massimo and I met with Paul to talk about where our various projects stand and where we go from here. The following are some highlights of that exciting hour and a half, full of cautious optimism and web browsing, as well as a general recap of the project so far..

The VHL interface is currently located here, on STG’s development server. It is very much a work in progress, and some features may not work at any given moment. But it’s coming along!

Part of Boccaccio’s Esposizioni sopra la Comedia is already online, and the rest is currently being encoded. The current plan is to have the entire text up online by the end of the current semester. The text can be viewed by exposition (example). We are looking for alpha testers of the annotation system! If you are a scholar with relevant expertise and would like to get an account, please email me (vhl-at-wordsend-org) There is no quantity commitment; however, at this point we’re looking for people who can both annotate the text and give us constructive feedback: what is good, what needs work (and what kind of work), what features would be desirable. The content of the annotations is up to the participant scholars. Current project participants: if you can think of possible interested parties, please email me as well.

We also have indexes, notably of people and places in the Esposizioni. If you would like to help us verify the entries, please help yourself! Instructions are on the above-linked pages.

Pico’s Conclusiones Nongentae, also known as the 900 Theses, is coming along. A group of scholars is ready to start annotating it as well. In order to render it more easily cross-referenced with other texts, Paul will merge the Pico database with the VHL database (which contains the Esposizioni annotations). This will not affect the user’s experience.

Massimo showed us a Latin lemmatizer called LemLat, the standalone software version of which looks potentially useful for the Pico text(s). We’re looking into it.

Paul told us about PhiloLogic, a search engine that STG has been studying. It is a powerful piece of software, which copies texts into its electronic brain and does its own thing with them, but allows you to modify the interface to fit into your project. We can potentially ask it to search annotations, if they are located within a file (as opposed to database). Paul is looking into its redundancy with MySQL; if it has unique features that we like, it may be our search engine soon.

The search engine is the largest overall VHL task for the year, technically speaking. What would you, o Researcher, like to be able to search for in our texts? Aside, that is, from simple string searches and already-developed things like word collocations?

One wish list item, which perhaps we’ll get to before the end of the grant, is a comparative Boccaccio/Villani glossary. This would be in addition to a glossary of terms that Boccaccio defines in the Esposizioni.

That’s about it, for the moment. Massimo, Paul: have I missed something?

For those interested in doing some “scalpitio capitis,” here are some little puzzles related to encoding:

1. FALACRO. It seems no one has any idea who this is. While this is not a problem in itself (cf. Leontonio), it could come back later to haunt us if we decide to give a special weight to attributes because (in my opinion) there is some confusion here on B’s part. Falacer is a god (perh. Etruscan) and so implicitly poses the problem of what to do with gods. See point 2.
2. VENERE PONTINA and GIOVE INDIGETE. We’ve encoded these two personalities of the major deities separately. Is that a good idea? In fact, have we decided what to do with the Christian God? He has so many personalities in the Esp. and is cited so often that this could be more trouble than it’s worth.
3. FRANCONE and MARCOMANNO. This one is of a less theoretical nature. Boccaccio cites them as if they were individuals, but in reality this may be due to a misreading (with all due respect). Marcomannus and francus were just two adjectives used to describe Germanic tribes. I’m bringing this up simply because we’ve decided to make a distinction between individual and collective names.

Any ideas on this would be much appreciated.

M

I’ve gone through the index nominum for cantos I-IV and have some observations that, I hope, are helpful.

Some typos to correct in the encoding:

Agrippina Maggiore is really Agrippina Minore;
Alcipiade should be Alcibiade;
Gaio Antonio should be added;
Antonio, Marco duplicates Marco Antonio;
Aristotene should be added;
Arunte should be Arruns;
Asclepiade the philosopher should be added;
Benedetto is the same as Boniface VIII;
Capi should be Capis;
Dionisio the Younger should be added;
Diotima should be Diutima;
Eune should be Eune Maura;
Since we have other personifications (e.g. Onore), we should add Filosofia;
Galeno, Claudio should be just Galieno;
We should add “san” to Gregorio, just for the sake of consistency;
Iaso should be Iasio;
Igino should be Iginio;
We should add the collective Inglesi;
Lucia and Lucia, santa should be merged;
Anco, Marcio should be changed to Marcio, Anco;
Marco Annenio should be merged with Seneca;
The Minturnesi are collective;
The first Nerone is the same as Domizio, Gneo;
Poppeia should be Poppeia Sabina;
The two entries for Proculo should be merged;
Roboam should be added;
Sciti should be Scizi;
The three entries for Silvio could be clarified by making them: Silvio, Enea; Silvio, Postumo Giulio; Silvio, Latinus.
Simone should be Simone Mago;
Tolomeo Feludense is the same as Tolomeo, Claudio.

Of course, if anyone notices a problem with any of this, please let me know. I’ve put together a list of the English equivalents and will send them shortly to Vika. There are, however, some more problems of a different nature that I’ll bring up in another post.

M

It looks like the online text is missing IV.lit.205-211.

Find it here. Please feel free to start working on it, per instructions contained on the page linked above as well as in the appropriate forum.

Ilione is encoded everywhere as place. However, in some cases it’s a city, and in others a man. To be corrected later by myself or Roberto; fyi for the rest of you.

A little context (if this is rehash for you, apologies): right now, we have an index of people’s names. I’m working on what I think is the next largest index, that of places. The way they work is twofold: we have the index page and, for each name we have a page of search results, displaying all the paragraphs in which said name appears, with the name itself in red.

Two (edit: three) questions have arisen with regard to the places index.

1. Some places that Boccaccio refers to are named something else now, something entirely different (for example, the former Trojan colony in Sicily that they called Acesta is now apparently called Calatafimi). How do we deal with that? The options, as I see them, are:

• Make Boccaccio’s name the primary index entry, and create another entry – unlinked to any page of search results – that says “see Acesta.”
• Make Boccaccio’s name the primary index entry and put an annotation into the text itself, noting the present-day name of the place. The drawback to this is that, if the place is mentioned several times, the annotator would have to first search for all its occurrences, and then link the annotation to all the relevant paragraphs. Might prove cumbersome, but also perhaps useful for the reader’s context.
• Index only the modern spellings of the place names, and Boccaccio’s spellings will show up in the search results page that lists all the paragraphs where a particular name occurs. Drawback is, if someone reads a place name in the text and wants to use the index to find its other occurrences, there’s no way to do that.
  • Unless! we make all the encoded names within the text not only colored, but also links to the same search results page where you arrive if you click on a name in the index. Which may be a good idea in any case: again, if a reader wants to see where a particular name occurs, they could do it straight from the text without going to the index, if they prefer.

My instinct is to go with the first option, possibly keeping in mind option 3.5. Anyone have opinions?

2. There are several seas mentioned. Sometimes they are called “mar[e] YYY” and sometimes just “il/l’YYY.” Do they get indexed under M (mare Egeo), or under their names (Egeo, mare or just Egeo)?

2a. My pipe dream in this regard is to eventually have indicators for every place name of what kind of place it is. But perhaps that’s for later.

3. Inferno/hell has several different names, including for example Baratro and Tartaro. Should we have all of the “variants” refer to the main entry inferno?

There’ll surely be other questions, but these are the most immediate. Thoughts?

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?

As some of you know, I’ve been working (with Paul’s invaluable help) on putting up the chunk of the Esposizioni that we’ve more or less completely encoded. This amounts to the Accessus, Canti I-III and most of Canto IV. Though this might not seem like much, let me assure you, it’s quite a bit of text, and the rest of the text is well on its way to being encoded as well. We probably won’t complete the encoding process until next fall, when Roberto may be able to join us again.

So. In order to put up the text in a useful way, that is, with at least some bells and whistles instead of what would look like plain text, we need to index it. Among other things, this means regularizing proper names. Those of you who did this with the Decameron will be feeling a slight chill and numbness as you read this; I’m thinking we need a better way of doing it.

Right now, I’m working on the index of people. This amounts to over 500 entries at last count. In order to make the index we need regularized names, a task that is complicated by the fact that sometimes Boccaccio refers to the wrong person, or refers to the right person but gives the wrong details about them, which makes their identity rather difficult to verify.

I’m far from an expert in historical work, but I’m working on coming up with regularized names for every entry, even if they are wrong. I’m doing this for several reasons. One is practical: I’ll soon be going away for a month and would like to put the thing up so that people can play with it. Another reason, though, is that this indexing business seems like a great opportunity to test out this online-collaboration thing we’ve been talking about. Here’s a detailed description of how this could work; it may sound definite, but I’m looking to y’all for opinions, suggestions and warnings of possible crash-and-burn.

We’ll have an index of names, coded in some way to distinguish between the names we’re pretty sure about (probably easiest would be with color – regular black for the ones we don’t need checked out, red for the ones we’re seeking help on). Each name will be a link to a page that will show you the context(s) for that name. From what I’ve seen so far, it would probably be enough to have the paragraph in which the name appears as well as the two paragraphs immediately preceding and following it.

I’ll set up a discussion forum, to which anyone will be able to post. We will advertise this everywhere we can: Kalamazoo, medievalist and Italianist and perhaps even history and comp. lit. mailing lists, individual emails to your friends who you think might be interested. Hopefully, there will be enough interest that people will post information about specific names on the forum, telling us the regularizations of these names, which of a set of people Boccaccio is likely to be talking about, and the source for this information.

The VHL team members will be the only ones who will change any of the information in the index itself. We’ll set up some sort of a checks-and-balances process, as appropriate.

The index will have only the names themselves (and any variants). Any additional information about the names will be put in as annotations to the text itself. If the annotation content has been research by someone who doesn’t have a participant-user account, we either make them a user (perhaps after a certain amount of input on their part, and with context-appropriate privileges) or one of us will post the annotation crediting the original author of the research and linking to their forum post.

How does this sound? What am I missing? Would you use such a system?

Just to let you know, the inaugural issue of the Digital Medievalist is up, featuring our article: ‘Towards the electronic Esposizioni: the challenges of the online commentary’. A full list of the other articles is here (I’m having my usual browser troubles, so this is via the MEDTEXT-L archive). Enjoy!

I noticed in the two-vol Mondadori ed. of the Esp. that the paragraph number for 1.all.93 is missing. If anyone has the red Opere vol, could s/he check to see where it is?

There’s a new blogging category: “typos and errors.” We’re finding some discrepancies between the critical edition and the one graciously provided to us by Prof. Pietro Beltrami and Opera del Vocabolario Italiano; such things are inevitable, and we’re keeping a running tally of error correction mostly for our and OVI’s benefit.

Today marks the first day of corrections, thanks to Mike’s eagle-eye proofreading. Two of them, both in Canto XIII, Esposizione Litterale.

1. Par. 13, which starts “Per le quali parole l’autore divenuto più attento…”: changed grai to guai.

2. Inserted missing par. 18, which I reproduce below for cutting and pasting. This comes right before par. 19, which starts “Dice adunque: E ‘l buon maestro…” Here’s the paragraph:

E dividesi questa parte in nove: nella prima Virgilio gli dimostra in qual girone egli è; nella seconda si maraviglia l’autore d’udir trar guai, e non veder da cui; nella terza Virgilio gli mostra come da questa maraviglia si solva; nella quarta l’autore fa quello che Virgilio gli dice; nella quinta lo spirito schiantato si ramarica; nella sesta Virgilio il consola e domandalo chi egli è; nella settima lo spirito dice chi egli è; nella ottava il domanda Virgilio come in quelle piante si leghino e se alcuna se ne scioglie mai; nella nona lo spirito risponde alla domanda. La seconda comincia quivi: “Io sentia”; la terza quivi: “Però disse”; la quarta quivi: “Allor porsi”; la quinta quivi: “E ’l tronco suo”; la sesta quivi: “S’egli avesse”; la settima quivi: “E ’l tronco: sì”; la ottava quivi: “Perciò rincominciò”; la nona quivi: “Allor soffiò”.

While going through canto XIII, I noticed that there are some odd inconsistencies in the use of quotation marks (odd in the sense that they are replaced by italics sometimes in our text, but not always. For the sake of documentation, the paragraphs in question are:

XIII.let.8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 22, 23, 24, 30, 33, 57, 59, 60, 61, 64, 84, 86 (twice), 87, 90, 93, 102, 105, 107, 111 and 112.

86 is a good example. You can see the inconsistencies quite clearly there. What’s our position on this?

M

p.s. Paragraph 18 was missing from the text. I have it, however, if anyone wants it…

My task for the Esposizioni at this time is the analysis of the rhetorical structure; specifically, I am keeping track of the rhetorical division of the commentary, which Boccaccio implemented in the expositions of his lectures. By following the unexpected divisions in which not only the text but also the commentary gets to be broken down, we watch a ‘reconstruction’ of the original text which displays Boccaccio’s own interests as well as the expectations of his audience. However, it is not easy to follow the divisions presented by the commentator, especially when one considers that we are no longer familiar with the majority of the references. In order to fully follow the explanations, and references to the commented text, it becomes necessary to rebuild the ‘lectio’, and c lean it of the endless diversions and subdivisions which can represent a true challenge.
The encoding of this ‘structure’ aims to reveal not only the practical organization of the lesson but also, and foremost, the ideology Boccaccio often desires to transmit. In fact, when we closely follow the structure Boccaccio offers for the lecture, and collate the series of ‘subdivisions’ he presents (and discusses), one comes across new categories and definitions. We know this by the fact that a certain noun, or adjective is carefully explained and often receives a lot of attention several times over the same canto or within the consecutive ones.
An interesting thing, even if very elementary, is how Boccaccio organizes his commentary. While discussing a certain verse, for example, he anticipates, or postpones various elements without respecting the chronological order of the original. For the purpose of clarity and/or the benefit of giving a complete definition of Hell, for example, Boccaccio does not hesitate to compress, in a relatively brief passage, Dante’s description, his own interpretation, Dante’s sources, and the topic(s) most familiar to the Florentine audience.
In the true spirit of the lesson, Boccaccio’s divisions and subdivisions appear to be are more dense in the first part of the commentary, that is, at the precise point where the audience needs the most a mental organization ready to receive what will be exposed later on.

As Vika mentioned, we’ve just submitted an article on the Esposizioni project, so most of my attention has been focused on that of late. I’ve been doing some general background on the commentary tradition, and thinking about the peculiarities of this text as an oral commentary, in comparison with the more usual written ones. Since my main area of responsibility on the project is the literary references, I’ve also been thinking about how they should be encoded. I’ve already come across some tricky questions, such as how to show references to multiple authored works such as the Bible. I have also been wondering how to represent those instances when Boccaccio uses Dante as an authority, citing further passages in the Commedia to illustrate his reading of the first 17 cantos of the Inferno. Should these just be treated like the citations of other authors, or could we do more?
One of my long-term projects is the compilation of an über-bibliography of Boccaccio’s works in English translation, and I’ve just discovered an English translation of part of the Esposizioni (Esp., X, 52-66) which I can include. The passage was translated by Maggie Günsberg, and appears in Michael Caesar, ed., Dante: The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 169-71. I only know of one other English translation of part of the Esposizioni, the Accessus, which appears in Alistair J. Minnis, Medieval literary theory and criticism c.1100-c.1375 : The commentary tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 503-19 (translated by David Wallace). Cristiana, Mike and I are working towards a new English translation of the Esposizioni, but until that appears, as far as I can tell, this is all there is! (If anyone come across any extracts from Boccaccio in English translation, especially in anthologies, then do please let me know.)