RETI REndering Texts and Images. Digital Scholarly Editions with Edition Visualization Technology

Editions of classical and medieval texts represent an essential part of the research in the humanities: a multidisciplinary approach by scholars in philology, palaeography, codicology and historical studies should provide the scientific community with reliable texts in order to open a crucial window towards the past. In recent years, a renovated attention to records and manuscripts has emerged, which takes into account both their materiality and their role in the building of the western and European culture of writing. Such an attention to literacy, culture, and written communication has increasingly gone together with a growing experimentation in the field of DHs. Digital editions have been tried and software implemented and tested: the boundaries of what scholars can ask to a software, and what a digital edition can offer to them are broadening. The RETI project aims to become an innovative part of such a process by testing an IT tool – EVT (Edition Visualisation Technology) – to produce editions of very different ancient and medieval documents and texts. EVT is a flexible open-source software that was developed at the universities of Pisa and Turin (that are part of the RETI project) and that has already proved successful in some specific cases, but whose full potential can be further implemented. The project focus on a group of four classic and medieval texts that are still completely or partially unpublished and for which a traditional edition on paper has unsurmountable limits. The texts are: an oration by the Greek orator and teacher of rhetoric Aelius Aristides, Cicero’s Lucullus, the illustrated medieval chronicle of Alessandro Streghi (Cronaca Streghi), and 22 so-called ‘fictitious epistles’ written between the 12th and the 15th century. These case studies have been carefully chosen, because of both their richness and their deep differences. Such variety and complexity represent a point of strength of the project: the chosen sources’ diversity will in fact allow our research units to combine competences and contexts that very rarely work together; moreover, it will make it possible to stretch the IT tool capabilities to answer to the most diverse editorial needs (layout, textual stratification, state of the tradition, presence of iconographic apparatus, etc.). By combining a solid traditional approach with the possibilities offered by information technology, we also intend to make a concrete contribution to the implementation of a tool that is both complex and simple to use. The final result will be manifold: together with the digital edition of the four texts used as case studies, we intend to provide both a tool and a model for all scholars involved in the edition of complex texts. At the same time, by making the project outcomes fully open-access and available online we will reach a wide audience of specialists and non-specialists, who will be able to draw on our material from very different perspectives.