Course description
Venice is a treasure of tangible and intangible cultural assets. Manuscripts preserved in its libraries and its museums (as well as the epigraphs and other valuable text bearing objects) offer the chance to study both the materiality of the primary sources and the immateriality of their textual contents.
This course is focused on the digital representation and the subsequent presentation on the web of samples from manuscripts preserved at Venice related to the multilingual textual tradition of The Travels of Marco Polo, one of the most iconic symbols of the openness of the city to the world.
The first action of the course provides students with a general overview about the multilingual textual tradition of The Travels of Marco Polo, also with the involvement of experts and the responsible of ongoing digital projects.
The second action equips students with the necessary knowledge and skills to represent textual data and metadata related to the primary sources according the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines.
The third action illustrates the role of CLARIN, the research infrastructure for linguistic resources and technologies, in the maintenance and outreach of digital textual corpora.

Learning outcomes
At the end of the course, students will be able
1. To understand the principles of a complex, multilingual textual tradition;
2. To encode a (part of) a manuscript according to the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines;
3. To publish on the web a simple digital scholarly edition;
4. To use the digital resources provided by the research infrastructures like CLARIN.

Teaching method
The course (face-to-face and/or online) is based on lectures with slideshows and lab activities (also face-to-face and/or online), in which the students apply their new skills to case studies discussed with the teacher and the classmates.

Syllabus
1.1. Overview
1.2. Lab: Exploring digital scholarly editions available online
2.1. Marco Polo, Le Divisement du Monde: a complex textual tradition
2.2. Lab: Manuscripts: data and metadata provided by the libraries
3.1. Text Encoding Initiative (TEI): a gentle introduction
3.2. Lab: Your first XML-TEI document
4.1. The manuscript description
4.2. Lab: Encoding metadata within the TEI header
5.1. The representation of primary sources
5.2. Lab: The International Image Interoperability Framework
6.1. Names, Dates, People and Places
6.2. Lab: Encoding the Named Entities
7.1. Linguistic Analyses
7.2. Lab: Dealing with the lemmatization
8.1. Linking, Segmentation and Alignment
8.2. Lab: Linking multilingual documents
9.1. From data representation to data presentation
9.2. Lab: Transforming XML-TEI to XHTML documents by XSLT
10.1. The Cascading Style Sheets
10.2. Lab: Creating Cascading Style Sheets
11.1. Making indexes and concordances (keywords in context)
11.2. Lab: The xquery language
12.1. Research infrastructures for language resources: CLARIN
12.2. Lab: Exploring the language resources and technologies provided by CLARIN

During the exam week, students will discuss their final presentation.

Evaluation Criteria
60% oral presentation and participation
40% final presentation

Bibliography
BURNARD, LOU, (2014), What is the Text Encoding Initiative?: how to add intelligent markup to digital resources, Marseille, OpenEdition Press.
BUZZONI, MARINA, EUGENIO BURGIO, MARTINA MODENA AND SAMUELA SIMION, (2016), Open versus closed recensions (Pasquali): Pros and cons of some methods for computer-assisted stemmatology, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 31 (3), 652–669.
SIEGEL, ERIK, AND ADAM RETTER, (2015) eXist: a NoSQL document database and application platform, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly

Further references will be provided along the course.