Towards the electronic <i>Esposizioni</i>: the challenges of the online commentary

Abstract

This article provides a brief introduction to Brown University's Virtual Humanities Lab (VHL)'s major new project: the electronic Esposizioni. The Esposizioni, like other texts available on Brown University's Decameron Web, is a major vernacular work by Boccaccio, and is the text of his unfinished lecture series on Dante's Commedia. The electronic Esposizioni project is fundamentally concerned with the definition of the relationship between two canonical medieval authors, Dante and Boccaccio, as expressed through the primary (commented) text and the secondary (commentary) text.The first part of the article provides an overview of the historical and literary contexts of Boccaccio's commentary on Dante. A great demand for explication and analysis of Dante's poem sprang up in Italy immediately after Dante's death in 1321, and Boccaccio's Esposizioni forms part of this tradition. However, unlike other Dante commentaries, the Esposizioni was not written with the intention of becoming a published book: it is instead the notes for the public lectures on Dante which Boccaccio gave in Florence in 1373-74. The oral intention and nature of this text is one of the elements upon which the electronic Esposizioni project focuses. One of the major benefits of the electronic medium is that we are able to distance the text from the material format of the bound book, which fixes the oral text as a canonical and immutable object.The second part of the article provides further information about how humanities computing has developed in the Italian Studies Department at Brown. Following a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the famous Decameron Web now forms part of the VHL, which has a dual role: to provide information about the civic, literary, and intellectual culture of Early Modern Italy to a broad audience of students and specialists alike; and to develop a variety of electronic tools for collaborative teaching and research. This section also considers the potential audience for the electronic Esposizioni project within the popular field of Dante studies, and compares the project to the already-established Dartmouth Dante Project, which is also concerned with Dante commentary.The final section of the paper presents the electronic edition of the Esposizioni, with a technical description of the commented and commentary texts, a discussion of the structural and semantic encoding principles, and some examples of the encoding in practice. Due to its nature as a hybrid medieval text, of which no autograph manuscript survives, Boccaccio's Esposizioni inevitably contains uncertainties. Rather then try to create a definitive online edition, we are thus constructing a Virtual Editing House which will allow scholars with privileged access the opportunity to comment and add their own annotations to the work. The project thus does not only present the commentary and commented text together for the first time in the digital medium, but will allow the creation of a new and ongoing commentary to Dante's poem.