3e séance du séminaire “Génétique éditoriale de la première modernité” (15 janvier 2019, 15h-17h, rue Pouchet)

Le mardi 15 janvier 2019, de 15h à 17h, aura lieu, au centre de l’ITEM-CNRS du 59/61 rue Pouchet, la 3e séance du séminaire de “Génétique éditoriale de la Première Modernité”.

Marina Buzzoni (Université Ca’ Foscari, Venise) “Marco Polo goes digital : new visualisation possibilities through EVT”

Marina Buzzoni with Eugenio Burgio, Elisa Cugliana, Chiara Martignano, and Samuela SimionCa’ Foscari University of Venice.

As some said, the Devisement dou Monde is a text of “embarassing complexity” (see, among many others, Bertolucci Pizzorusso, V. 1975. Milione : versione toscana del Trecento. Milano : Adelphi). Trying to understand the Devisement dou Monde and its reception means diving into a net of translations, copies and rewritings that served different purposes in different contexts : finding one’s way there is not an easy task. In order to achieve this ultimate goal, the journey through the sources needs to be a guided one, starting from a base text that functions as a synthesis from which it is possible to penetrate the textual tradition of the work : a discursive commentary for each pericope of the text will take the user by hand not only through the travels of the Venetian voyager, but also through the journey of the text itself. Once the connections between the many elements that make up the text are identified, they are encoded, together with all the contents of the edition, in TEI XML, according to specific criteria which will be illustrated in the talk. The resulting file is processed by EVT (Edition Visualization Technology, <http://evt.labcd.unipi.it/>), a software that is able to display the content of the edition and allows the user to interact with it. To create a digital edition, EVT needs to parse the XML file and extract a data model which represents the different contents of the edition, as well as the relationships between them. Bearing in mind that the readability of a digital edition can be compromised by a poor user interface that is not able either to represent nor effectively handle the complexity of the text, EVT’s interface is designed to take into account most of the possible TEI XML encoding solutions. Furthermore, in order to ensure a higher level of flexibility, the software can also be set up for specific visualisation and parsing features. Once the data model is ready, the user interface is built dynamically around it.