Bellini’s Correspondence: a Digital Scholarly Edition for a Multimedia Museum
10.6092/issn.2532-8816/9162
Nel contesto del progetto “Museo Virtuale della Musica BellinInRete” sarà codificato e reso fruibile un corpus di lettere manoscritte del noto compositore catanese Vincenzo Bellini (1801-1835). Questo contributo si prefigge l’obiettivo di illustrare nel dettaglio la parte di progetto inerente lo sviluppo del prototipo per la metadatazione, codifica, gestione, indicizzazione e visualizzazione delle lettere belliniane. A oggi è stato definito lo schema di codifica seguendo le ultime linee guida della Text Encoding Initiative e istanziato su un campione rappresentativo di missive. Contestualmente, è stato realizzato un primo ambiente di fruizione personalizzando due strumenti software open source: Edition Visualization Technology e Omega Scholarly platform. La realizzazione dell’edizione digitale del corpus epistolare risponde, in primo luogo, all’esigenza di rendere fruibile al grande pubblico questa parte del patrimonio culturale custodito presso il Museo Civico Belliniano di Catania, senza rinunciare al rigore scientifico della trascrizione delle lettere presente nella recente edizione critica ([3]) a cura di Seminara. L’edizione digitale del corpus epistolare presta particolare attenzione alla gestione dei metadati relativi alla corrispondenza, codificati mediante l’utilizzo del tagset TEI correspDesc. L’edizione delle lettere belliniane sarà sia consultabile via Web, sia integrata in un percorso museale multimediale e interattivo in allestimento presso il Museo Belliniano. 
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Bellini’s Correspondence: a Digital Scholarly Edition for a Multimedia Museum
https://umanisticadigitale.unibo.it/article/view/9162/9914
    Umanistica Digitale - ISSN:2532-8816 – n. 7, 2019
A. M. Del Grosso, E. Capizzi, S. Cristofaro, M. R. De Luca, E. Giovannetti, S. Marchi, G.
Seminara, D. Spampinato – Bellini's Correspondence: a Digital Scholarly Edition for a
Multimedia Museum
DOI: http://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2532-8816/9162


  Bellini’s Correspondence: a Digital Scholarly Edition
                for a Multimedia Museum

   1
       Angelo Mario Del Grosso, 2 Erica Capizzi, 3 Salvatore Cristofaro, 4 Maria Rosa De Luca,
         5
           Emiliano Giovannetti, 6Simone Marchi, 7Graziella Seminara, 8Daria Spampinato

                           1,5,6
                                Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, CNR, Italia
                                     2,4,7
                                          Università di Catania, Catania, Italia
                     3,8
                        Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, CNR, Italia
                                      1
                                        angelo.delgrosso@ilc.cnr.it
                                            2
                                              ericacapizzi@yahoo.it
                                   3
                                     salvatore.cristofaro@istc.cnr.it
                                                 4
                                                   mdeluca@unict.it
                                    5
                                      emiliano.giovannetti@ilc.cnr.it
                                         6
                                           simone.marchi@ilc.cnr.it
                                              7
                                                g.seminara@unict.it
                                          8
                                            daria.spampinato@cnr.it


         Abstract

Within the “Museo Virtuale della Musica BellinInRete” project, a corpus of letters, written by
the renowned composer Vincenzo Bellini (1801 - 1835) from Catania, will be encoded and
made publicly available. This contribution aims at illustrating the part of the project regarding
the implementation of the ongoing prototype for the metadata and text encoding, indexing
and visualization of Bellini’s correspondence. The encoding scheme has been defined according
to the latest guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative and it has been instantiated on a sample
of letters. Contextually, a first environment has been implemented by customizing two open
source tools: Edition Visualization Technology and Omega Scholarly platform. The main objective
of the digital edition is to engage the general public with the cultural heritage held by the
Belliniano Civic Museum of Catania. This wide access to Bellini’s correspondence has been
conceived preserving the scholarly transcriptions of the letters edited by Seminara within her
recent critical edition ([3]). The digital edition of the corpus takes care of handling the
correspondence metadata by means of the correspDesc TEI tagset. Finally, Bellini's letters will be
accessible via the Web platform as well as integrated into a forthcoming interactive and
multimedia tour hosted at the museum.
Nel contesto del progetto “Museo Virtuale della Musica BellinInRete” sarà codificato e reso
fruibile un corpus di lettere manoscritte del noto compositore catanese Vincenzo Bellini (1801-
1835). Questo contributo si prefigge l’obiettivo di illustrare nel dettaglio la parte di progetto


                                                         23
     Umanistica Digitale - ISSN:2532-8816 – n. 7, 2019

inerente lo sviluppo del prototipo per la metadatazione, codifica, gestione, indicizzazione e
visualizzazione delle lettere belliniane. A oggi è stato definito lo schema di codifica seguendo le
ultime linee guida della Text Encoding Initiative e istanziato su un campione rappresentativo di
missive. Contestualmente, è stato realizzato un primo ambiente di fruizione personalizzando
due strumenti software open source: Edition Visualization Technology e Omega Scholarly
platform. La realizzazione dell’edizione digitale del corpus epistolare risponde, in primo luogo,
all’esigenza di rendere fruibile al grande pubblico questa parte del patrimonio culturale
custodito presso il Museo Civico Belliniano di Catania, senza rinunciare al rigore scientifico
della trascrizione delle lettere presente nella recente edizione critica ([3]) a cura di Seminara.
L’edizione digitale del corpus epistolare presta particolare attenzione alla gestione dei metadati
relativi alla corrispondenza, codificati mediante l’utilizzo del tagset TEI correspDesc. L’edizione
delle lettere belliniane sarà sia consultabile via Web, sia integrata in un percorso museale
multimediale e interattivo in allestimento presso il Museo Belliniano.
Keywords: Digital Scholarly Edition, Correspondence, Digital and Computational Philology,
Software Design, Vincenzo Bellini, Music, Multimedia Museum


       1. Introduction

This paper aims at illustrating the BellinInRete digital correspondence project which concerns the
implementation of a digital prototype based on a corpus of letters. It involves text encoding,
metadata recording, data indexing and visual rendering of a collection of missives written by
the renowned composer Vincenzo Bellini (1801 - 1835) from Catania.1
BellinInRete digital correspondence is part of the “Museo Virtuale della Musica BellinInRete”
project (hereafter BellinInRete), which aims at renewing and creating a lasting change in the
exploitation and enhancement of the Belliniano Civic Museum of Catania, through a new
museum exhibition design. This challenging objective will be pursued by adopting digital
methods and by developing, at the same time, a new communicative standpoint of the tangible
and intangible cultural heritage. The new museum set up tells the main periods of Vincenzo
Bellini's life by means of audiovisual technologies within peculiar scenographic settings that
evoke the different theater environments of the early XIX century (orchestra, scene, foyer,
stage), in which the visitor is immersed with the help of the "life in 4 acts" story of the Maestro.
In the museum rooms the arias and some parts of the Maestro's works will be reproduced. The
Museum will show both the Bellini's material documents, and the intangible cultural heritage.
Indeed, the digital edition of the letters aims to render both the tangible legacy as well as what
cannot be touched, namely the theoretical heritage, the knowledge, and the aesthetic heritage
that has been produced during the time. Inside the museum rooms, a screen will be set up for
the public engagement with the digital edition of the missives.
One of the most ambitious aims of the BellinInRete project is to promote the variegated
ecosystem of Italian opera, making it accessible and understandable even to a non-specialist
audience. Bellini's legacy consists of heterogeneous resources related to the archival,
1   The present paper is an extension of the abstract presented at the AIUCD2018 Conference [13].


                                                 24
     A. M. Del Grosso, E. Capizzi, S. Cristofaro, M. R. De Luca, E. Giovannetti, S. Marchi, G.
        Seminara, D. Spampinato – Bellini's Correspondence: a Digital Scholarly Edition for a
                                                                         Multimedia Museum

bibliographic and museum fields, with particular regard to the music domain. It includes
autograph scores, booklets, handwritten letters, museum objects, sound and audiovisual
reproductions, photographs and a wide library.
Above all, this project involves the analysis and the organization of the Museum's heritage
according to the most recent and accredited standards and specifications for data and metadata
with regards to museums, libraries and archives. Once digitized, the aforementioned heritage
will embody a large knowledge base accessible through a multi-channel digital museum that
illustrates the content of the documents.
The whole BellinInRete project lays its effectiveness on a multidisciplinary base taking
advantage of a set of complementary competences from different institutions: the University of
Catania, the Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC) of the CNR of Catania
and the Institute for Computational Linguistics "A. Zampolli" (ILC) of the CNR of Pisa.
Experts in musicology, archivistics, philology, art history, history of theater and entertainment,
experts in communication processes and technologies, in knowledge management, technologies
and methodologies, and in computer sciences and information technology have been involved.
A prototype of a selection of the Maestro's correspondence kept at the Museum will be ready in
conjunction with the new scenographic installation, scheduled in summer 2020.
The main objective of the digital edition is to engage the general public with the cultural
heritage held by the Belliniano Civic Museum of Catania. This wide access to Bellini
correspondence has been conceived preserving the scholarly transcriptions of the letters edited
by Graziella Seminara within her most recent critical edition [3]. The encoding scheme has
been defined by the CNR partners according to the latest guidelines of the Text Encoding
Initiative and it has been instantiated on a sample of letters for evaluating the feasibility of the
entire process.2 The main purpose of the developed scheme is to encode the correspondence
metadata by means of the correspDesc tagset.3 Alongside the transcription and encoding of the
text, standard techniques for archive cataloging and bibliographic description of the
correspondence have been analyzed by the university and the museum partners and the
adherence to some well-known schemes has been taken into account (e.g., UNIMARC scheme
for recording bibliographic items,4 due to the fact that the digital catalog has been recorded by
means of the SBN platform).
In this scenario, the good practices of the Semantic Web, by which information from the
documents to the most authoritative public datasets (such as VIAF, 5 Geonames6 and RISM7)

2   The TEI guidelines are available at the following Web address: https://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-
    p5-doc/en/html/index.html.
3   https://tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-correspDesc.html
4   UNIversal MAchine Readable cataloging https://www.ifla.org/unimarc
5   Virtual International Authority File, https://viaf.org/
6   http://www.geonames.org/
7   Répertoire International des Sources Musicales, http://www.rism.info/


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     Umanistica Digitale - ISSN:2532-8816 – n. 7, 2019

are linked, were considered appropriate to meet the hermeneutical requirements of BellinInRete
digital correspondence.
Finally, the digital edition combines the facsimile scanned image of each Bellini’s letter with the
corresponding electronic transcription, conducted with conservative criteria in respect to the
form of the original document's dictation.
The paper is structured as follows. After an overview of Bellini’s corpus which is preserved at
the Belliniano Civic Museum of Catania (section 2) and a brief survey about related initiatives
(section 3) concerning inspiring works on digital archives of letters and music documents; the
objectives and the methodology adopted in this project are described in section 4, which
analyses the work so far conducted for the production of the digital edition of Bellini’s
correspondence. This latter section examines in detail the entire process which has been put in
place starting from the description of the physical documents and ending with the exploitation
of the digital edition throughout a Web-based scholarly environment. In particular, section 4.1
illustrates the metadata encoding activities along with related issues. Subsequently, the
digitization work for the facsimile image acquisition is described (section 4.2). The design
choices and the schema definition for the digital representation and encoding of the letters are
discussed in section 4.3. The Web scholarly platform prototype, instantiated ad hoc for the
analysis and dissemination of the digital edition, is illustrated in section 4.4. The paper ends
with some notes concerning further developments planned as next steps of BellinInRete.


       2. The Bellini corpus preserved at the museum

Currently, 41 autographed letters of Vincenzo Bellini are kept in the archive of the Belliniano
Civic Museum of Catania. The initial nucleus of this collection originates from the donation of
maestro Ascanio Bazan, great-grandson of the famous composer, which took place in July 1930
when the museum collections were set up, while other letters were acquired later. However, in
the absence of an inventory of the archival assets owned by the Belliniano Civic Museum, it is
impossible to determine exactly the acquisition date of each of these documents. It is only
thanks to the information contained in some historical catalogs that it is possible to date back
the presence of a certain number of these letters in the Museum given the time in which the
catalogs themselves have been written. On the basis of this criterion it can be stated that in
1935, the year of publication of the second edition of the catalog compiled by Benedetto
Condorelli ([10]), there were already 25 copies in the collection. Similarly, from the
examination of another inventory ([25]), it results that at least seven more letters were acquired
since the publication of the Condorelli catalog; however, the information that can be gained
from this document - written in 1968 - is not always reliable due to the fact that record
descriptions are not accurate and detailed. Finally, another acquisition regarding a small
number of Bellini's letters took place in 1998 when the Municipality of Catania purchased an
epistolary collection, put up for sale by Christie’s, belonging to Giovanni Battista Perucchini
(1784-1869), a nobleman Venetian amateur. This collection is now kept in the Belliniano Civic
Museum, and it is entirely cataloged in the "Fondo Perucchini" [9].



                                               26
     A. M. Del Grosso, E. Capizzi, S. Cristofaro, M. R. De Luca, E. Giovannetti, S. Marchi, G.
        Seminara, D. Spampinato – Bellini's Correspondence: a Digital Scholarly Edition for a
                                                                         Multimedia Museum

Bellini's autographed letters kept in the Bellini Civic Museum of Catania are arranged over a
period of time that covers the whole life of the musician: from the "Supplica" sent by the young
Vincenzo in May 1819 to Stefano Notarbartolo8 to the draft of the letter addressed to Giovanni
Ricordi, dated September 3, 1835.9
Nonetheless, their distribution is extremely irregular, as it is the origin of the documentary
material: a fair number of letters date back to the years 1830-32 and comes largely from private
collections; a second, much larger group of letters, refers to Bellini's stay in Paris in the last
three years of his life (from 1833 to 1835) and was transmitted by Rossini to his family after
the death of the musician. This explains the peculiar typology of this last group of misssives:
they are mostly drafts, sketches of missives, that Bellini generally prepared for high-ranking
recipients and for which he felt the need for a more supervised and stylistically elevated writing.


        3. Related work

The digital edition of Vincenzo Bellini's correspondence kept at the Belliniano Civic Museum
of Catania, as a part of BellinInRete, is an initiative of great cultural importance and with a clear
innovative contribution, since, currently, there are no similar projects in Italy related to opera
composers of the nineteenth century.
The followed approach is similar to that adopted successfully in other initiatives, where the
epistolary corpora have been codified following the TEI guidelines ([7]). Among other things, a
Special Interest Group of TEI (Correspondence SIG), has worked, from 2008 to 2014, on the
development of the CorrespDesc tagset towards the definition of a standard encoding schema for
correspondence data ([22]). The CorrespSearch web service10 makes use of this resource and
allows to index letters by sender, recipient, date, place of sending and place of receiving through
the Correspondence Metadata Interchange Format (CMIF) protocol ([19]).
Among the projects closest to the BellinInRete objectives we mention, first of all, the German
project WeGa that involves the digital edition of works and writings of the musician Carl
Maria von Weber.11 In the Digital Archive of Letters in Flanders (DALF) project, 12 it has been
digitized a corpus of 1500 letters extracted from the Flemish literature "Van Nu en Straks"
magazine. Many of the markup elements produced within the DALF project have been

8  In the Supplica, the young Vincenzo Bellini (not yet eighteen years old) asked Stefano Notarbartolo,
   Duke of Sammartino, Intendant of the Valley of the city of Etna, to grant him a scholarship in order
   to follow the course of composition at the Royal College of Music of San Sebastiano in Naples.
9 In this draft, Bellini, 20 days before his premature death, communicated to his publisher that he had
   discovered the person responsible for placing an unauthorized copy of the Puritani score in the
   theatrical market.
10 http://correspsearch.net/index.xql?id=about&l=en
11 http://weber-gesamtausgabe.de/de/Index
12 http://ctb.kantl.be/project/dalf/index.htm


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      Umanistica Digitale - ISSN:2532-8816 – n. 7, 2019

subsequently reused for the digital edition of the Van Gogh letter project. 13 "In Mozart's
Words" is a project aimed to collect, preserve and enhance the correspondence of the musician
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.14 This project, thanks to an accurate digital encoding of the
content of the letters, allows to discover and deepen the experiences of the Austrian composer’s
life via Web.
The recent online archive of “Casa Ricordi” does not seem to follow the scholarly best practices
dictated by the DH community.15 However, this initiative has really remarkable benefits
considering the huge and worthy heritage now available and freely accessible via Web, as well as
the transcription of a broad collection of letters, including some of those written by Bellini.
The ILC participated in the “Clavius on the Web” project whose main purpose was to digitize,
process and share online a corpus of letters sent to the jesuit and mathematician Christophorus
Clavius ([1]).16 Similarly to BellinInRete, the project has been carried out with a twin-track
approach, by digitizing, encoding and annotating the letters and, at the same time, by
developing an interface to make the letters and their content publicly available on the Web.
The letters have been transcribed and encoded using TEI-XML P5, then the texts have been
tokenized and annotated at linguistic, terminological and semantic levels. All the information
has been made explicit and dereferenced with Canonical URN ([4]) and shared as Linked
Open Data (LOD) [24]. From a visualization perspective, three HTML5 interfaces have been
developed to let the user access to all the aforementioned data: the first to browse the
manuscript, the second to visualize all the annotations and the third for storytelling purposes.
Although Proust's drafts prototype project does not focus on the digital edition of letters, 17 a
mention has to be deserved to this initiative, in which interesting solutions to encode genetic
editions are proposed. Finally, with regards to the aspects of cataloging and linking contents in
the Semantic Web environment, worth noting is the "RISM" project, which is considered an
authority catalog of the musical domain. It has developed a LOD archive of a broad collection
of musical sources accessible through a dedicated SPARQL endpoint.18


         4. Objectives of the project and methodology

Albeit the main objective of the project is to produce, preserve and make available the digital
edition of Bellini's correspondence, there are some elements of innovation that distinguish this
initiative from other similar projects. Besides the online publication, the digital edition will be
available also within the setting of the Belliniano Museum, thus allowing visitors to "touch by
hand" the original documents for a more immersive experience.
The experimentation of the tagset correspDesc of the TEI header and the use of the LOD

13   http://vangoghletters.org/
14   http://letters.mozartways.com/
15   https://www.digitalarchivioricordi.com/it/collection/lettere
16   http://claviusontheweb.it/
17   http://research.cch.kcl.ac.uk/proust_prototype/
18   https://opac.rism.info/index.php?id=8&L=1#c116/


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     A. M. Del Grosso, E. Capizzi, S. Cristofaro, M. R. De Luca, E. Giovannetti, S. Marchi, G.
        Seminara, D. Spampinato – Bellini's Correspondence: a Digital Scholarly Edition for a
                                                                         Multimedia Museum

paradigm in the activity of annotation of the letters (see 4.3) as well as the implementation of a
prototype environment (see 4.4), constitute some further elements of innovation.
Finally, as expected from a project of this nature, the texts that will be made available and
shared online, will make Vincenzo Bellini known to a wider audience of non-experts.
In agreement with the experts of the domain, the initial phase has been focused on the digital
edition of Bellini's letters and on cataloging and metadata encoding. The production of this
edition envisages to work on two technological fronts in parallel: on the one hand, the TEI
encoding of textual phenomena and metadata, on the other hand, the description of the
relevant entities by means of formal vocabularies defined by following the Semantic Web
technologies.


        4.1. Metadata encoding
The Management of the Museum has made available an inventory of the manuscripts (written
in the years 2000), some lists of documentary materials in the library, and some objects kept in
the Museum. These lists do not adhere to specific conventions and they are therefore not
present in national or international catalogs (SBN, SAN, Internet Culturale, etc.). 19 In the
elaboration of a systematic catalog, functional to making the Museum's heritage available on
the Web, cataloging rules for the musical and documentary material at the base of the SBN
platform20 were taken into consideration: uniform title for the scores, catalog manuals,
description of the manuscripts. Where not present, a unique identification code has been
created for the documents with its specific signature. The other elements of Bellini's heritage
have been meta-dated according to the catalog sheets of the Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la
Documentazione.21 In this way it will be possible to exploit the sharing protocols provided by
the Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC - Z39.50), useful to encode appropriately the access
information, and to index the document to be cataloged.
Metadata are currently being published in national catalogs, and the creation of an ontology
dealing with the contents of Bellini's heritage is planned, by extracting the concepts of
particular interest which are present in the letters (names of persons, places, etc.) and in other
documents, and by referring to standard metadata schemes such as RDA, 22 FRBRoo23 and
FOAF.24 Moreover, with a view to the reuse and interoperability of the Semantic Web resources,

19 It is worth to mention the publication, between the 1930s and the 1990s, of three catalogs illustrating
   the legacy owned by the Museum, precious repertoires which however do not meet any cataloging
   standards, see [11] [21] and [18].
20 Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale, https://opac.sbn.it
21 www.iccd.beniculturali.it/
22 Resource Description and Access, http://www.rda-rsc.org/
23 Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records object oriented, http://www.cidoc-
   crm.org/frbroo/home-0
24 Friend Of A Friend, http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/


                                                   29
     Umanistica Digitale - ISSN:2532-8816 – n. 7, 2019

an accurate analysis of existing ontologies, vocabularies and thesaurus has been carried out,
with particular attention to the music domain; therefore, the above mentioned RISM project
for the musical domain and the VIAF and GeoNames resources for the other concepts have
been taken as reference.
All letters and documents that have been reorganized and cataloged are currently divided into
different sections, each of which an identification code has been assigned to. In line with the
criterion adopted in the most recent critical edition of Bellini's correspondence ( [3]), the
missives have been organized in chronological order with respect to the present or presumed
date of the letter and the abbreviation LL has been chosen for the missives attributable to
Vincenzo Bellini and to his family of origin.
In the current exhibition of the Museum, the autographed letters of the Catanese composer are
all displayed in the windows of the birth house, with the exception of one letter. The LL1
acronym has been assigned to the group of Vincenzo Bellini's autographed letters which has a
total of 41 units. The 85 letters addressed to the composer from Catania were collected,
instead, under the acronym LL2. An additional letter was also found, 25 the location of which
was unknown at the time of the recognition carried out by Seminara in [3]. Several missives
have also been found, which can be traced back to a time interval following the death of
Vincenzo Bellini. These are letters, or more frequently drafts of letters addressed to the father or
to other members of the family. Furthermore, two other categories have been devised, LL3 and
LL4 - with 39 and 48 units respectively -, which have been organized according to the criteria
previously described. A small group of letters (14 missives) has been grouped under the LL5
acronym and consists of letters sent by people not belonging to the Bellini family addressed to
different recipients.26
The signature of the individual documents (e.g. LL1.4) identifies the group which the
document belongs to, followed, after a dot, by a progressive serial number. In the quite
frequent cases where the same unit contains more than one letter, it has been preferred to assign
the same signature to both letters with the addition of I and II to show that it is a "multiple"
document. All the signatures assigned to the individual units, when they were inserted in SBN,
were accompanied by an alphanumeric code that contains information about the institution
where the document is located; this is the code assigned by SBN: for the Belliniano Civic
Museum of Catania, the string that precedes the signature is CT0031, so, for example, the first
letter of Bellini is marked as CT0031_LL1.1 and this represents his unique "identification
code".
The elements highlighted in the cataloging phase are functional to the description of the main

25 This regards the letter that Giuseppe Alvaro Paternò sent to Vincenzo Bellini (9 July 1826, Catania),
   in [3], p. 71 n. 6.
26 In addition to correspondence, there are a number of documents, on display or in archive, which were
   cataloged: these are mainly documents produced by the Municipality of Catania or budget notes sent
   to Vincenzo Bellini, inventories of his legacy and legal documents. Inside the Bellini Civic Museum
   there is also the “Fondo Perucchini”, composed of a considerable number of letters (only those
   addressed to the Venetian musician are over 700 units) and also includes some musical pages,
   handwritten and printed documents, and other materials.


                                                  30
     A. M. Del Grosso, E. Capizzi, S. Cristofaro, M. R. De Luca, E. Giovannetti, S. Marchi, G.
        Seminara, D. Spampinato – Bellini's Correspondence: a Digital Scholarly Edition for a
                                                                         Multimedia Museum

characteristics of each document and concern not only the elements relating to the sender,
recipient, dating, etc. but also the current location of the cataloging resource and its physical
characteristics, as the format, and the language in which the text is written.


        4.2. Digitization of the Bellini correspondence
Most of the paper documentation existing at the Museum (mostly handwritten) was
reproduced in digital format. With regard to the letters written by and addressed to Bellini,
about 600 photo shots in three different formats (TIFF master at 600 dpi with a color depth of
24-bit RGB, JPEG compressed to 300 dpi and JPEG compressed to 100 dpi) were taken. The
relative descriptive metadata encoded in MAG format has been attached to each set of images. 27
The scanning activity was carried out in the Museum's rooms to protect the extreme delicacy
and preciousness of the original documents. To this end, a portable digital high-definition
colour planetary/robotic scanner, with a special plane to minimize the effects of deformation
and cold neon lighting, has been installed. The images will be cut out, balanced and processed
in order to offer a digital facsimile representation that corresponds to the original as much as
possible.


        4.3. Letters encoding
After the phases concerned with the metadata encoding and with the digital acquisition of
Bellini’s correspondence, the documents were analyzed to identify the textual and metatextual
information which had to be marked up. As indicated supra, the digital edition of Bellini’s
letters is based on data that are already published in the philological study conducted in [3].
Within the BellinInRete project, the edition is conceived to follow the image-based encoding,
consequently providing the facsimile reproduction of the original document in parallel with the
electronic version of the transcription. The textual and structural phenomena have been
appropriately encoded in TEI XML format in the electronic document.
In particular, in this edition some textual phenomena have been taken into account that were
omitted in the printed edition for editorial reasons. Moreover, some information was added
within the encoded texts by exploiting linking mechanisms both to external resources as well as
to internal files.
The added value of this digital edition is not limited to the metatextual data associated with the
digital transcription of the letters. Indeed, the user is able to view the digital reproduction of
the autographs, coming in contact with the emotional charges of Bellini (evident in the anxious
profile of his writing), with his morphological and lexical uncertainties (visible by the large
amount of self-corrections), but also with his correspondence to the "rules" of the epistolary
grammar of the nineteenth century.

27 Metadati Amministrativi Gestionali (MAG) is an Italian standard for collecting metadata related to
   digital objects, according to international standards.


                                                  31
     Umanistica Digitale - ISSN:2532-8816 – n. 7, 2019

One example of these rules is the use of the so called "dar la linea", namely, the amplitude of
the space between the introductory formula and the body of the letter and between the
conventional closing formulas and the final signature, which depended on the hierarchical
relationship between the writer and the addressee: an aspect of Bellini's epistolary writing that
appears to be closely related with the multiplicity of stylistic levels (confidential or formal)
consciously adopted by the musician according to his correspondents.
Often the letters present successive third hands annotations made by catalogers. These
metadata were managed with the TEI handDesc module.
The analysis phase produced an encoding scheme suitable to record and process data related to
the selected corpus.28 The encoding provides scholars with advanced navigation features that
can describe historical-critical information, displaying, next to the transcribed text, the critical
apparatus drawn up by the editor.
The defined XML scheme considers the adoption of two important extensions of the TEI
Header: the correspDesc29 and the msDesc30 elements. The first one, placed in the profileDesc
descriptor, is suitable to record the correspondence; while the second one, situated in the TEI
"manuscript description" module, is useful for the physical description of the letters.
Furthermore, the msDesc elements allow to structure all the characteristic aspects of the
manuscript, encoding the descriptive, codicological, structural and content data.
The encoding work was carried out on a representative sample of letters. For example, the
manuscript letter that Vincenzo Bellini sent from Puteaux to Carlo Pepoli dating 26 June 1834
has been encoded with LL1.16 signature. This document corresponds to the 16th Bellini's
letter kept at the museum in chronological order.
The current signatures and collocations of the letters, defined in the cataloging phase, have
been appropriately encoded by using the msIdentifier element.
Specific interest was given to the extratextual aspects related to the physical layout of the letters.
Generally, the letters themselves also have the purpose of acting as envelopes. In fact, the letters
are folded on themselves and postmarks and wax seals are sometimes affixed on them, see for
example the folio in Figure 1. The TEI msDesc module defines all the descriptors to suitably
encode all the necessary information regarding preservation conditions, the type of paper, the
description of the stamps and to the seals, the size and modality of folding the folio, the
collation, and other codicological and archival metadata.




28 A first version of the TEI-encoded document is available at the prototype link
   http://licodemo.ilc.cnr.it/bellini-in-rete/
29 http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/it/html/ref-correspDesc.html
30 http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-msDesc.html


                                                  32
    A. M. Del Grosso, E. Capizzi, S. Cristofaro, M. R. De Luca, E. Giovannetti, S. Marchi, G.
       Seminara, D. Spampinato – Bellini's Correspondence: a Digital Scholarly Edition for a
                                                                        Multimedia Museum




                Figure 1: Enveloping of letter LL1.4.




The adoption of the correspDesc element has allowed us to enrich the encoding of the logical-
structure of the document (sender, recipient, date of sending, date of receipt, communication
context, closing of letters). Figure 2 shows an example about the correspDesc tagset for the
LL1.16 letter.
In addition to the traditional encoding concerning the structural hierarchies of the document
and the logical hierarchies of the text, the schema also allows to represent other important
information related to the content of the letters (through the front, body and back elements of
the text node).




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     Umanistica Digitale - ISSN:2532-8816 – n. 7, 2019




Figure 2: The correspDesc module relative to letter LL1.16.


Given the method through which the document is folded and enveloped, the front element
contains information about both the addressee and the description of the stamps, as well as to
other regions of interest upon the selected folio (hotspots). The content model of the body
element contains, instead, the text encoding of the letter, which is conducted line-by-line,
taking into account alignments, headlines, newlines, spelling phenomena (such as
abbreviations, underscores, deletions, etc.), the addressee (encoded by adopting the opener type
node), as well as the introductory and farewell formulas, and the final salutation with the
author signature (closer). In particular, the introductory and farewell formulas have been
encoded through the salute (Figure 3), responding to formal stylistic choices of the maestro, as
already mentioned supra. Finally, the back element contains bibliographic references to other
critical editions of the letter, as well as editorial notes and further information extracted from
the printed edition.31 Notes, generally, have the purpose of contextualizing what is expressed in
the text; however, no new notes have been created when linking an item encoded in other lists
is sufficient to deepen and understand the selected textual fragment, as will be explained infra.




Figure 3: Introductory formula of letter LL1.16 encoded with salute tag.

31 As already mentioned, one of the main objectives of the BellinInRete project (and the digital edition)
   is the full availability of the materials not only to the experts, but also to occasional museum visitors
   like school children. Therefore it is extremely important to explicitly encode all the information that
   is implicit within the text in an immediate and sometimes simplified ways.


                                                    34
     A. M. Del Grosso, E. Capizzi, S. Cristofaro, M. R. De Luca, E. Giovannetti, S. Marchi, G.
        Seminara, D. Spampinato – Bellini's Correspondence: a Digital Scholarly Edition for a
                                                                         Multimedia Museum

Indeed, the museum context and the educational purpose, underlying this digital edition, have
led us to provide a set of lists of named entities, explicitly cited in the text or implicitly
referenced. These lists are accessible within the context of the visualization of the letters,
through the use of inline pop-up and references to authoritative online datasets. A list of people
(TEI-ListPerson) has been created in order to be always available and independent from the
contexts in which the names appear. This list includes the addressees and the persons present in
the text, mentioned or implicitly referenced. Most of the information relative to each entry has
been taken from the notes of the source critical edition. A short biographical note and the
social role (count, baron, etc.) have been appropriately defined; the role in the musical context
(librettist, tenore, etc.) has been encoded using the syntax of the guidelines of the Music
Encoding Initiative (MEI).32 External references to the authoritative RISM and Treccani
repertoires (Biographical Dictionary) have been added as well.
By virtue of the divulgative nature of the edition, it has been decided to create the list TEI-
ListOrganization, which includes the theaters mentioned in the text, and the theaters where the
Opera premieres took place. This list has been created according to the Treccani repertoire by
using the orgName and listOrg elements.
The list of places (TEI-ListPlace) contains the places where people were born and died, the
places mentioned in the text and the cities where the Opera premieres took place. The external
reference to the Geonames dataset is always added, as well as the reference to the Treccani
dictionary.
It has been chosen to include in TEI-ListTerm both the words explained in notes in the
reference edition, and all the occurrences of terms specifically belonging to the musical domain
(duetto, sortita, atto, etc.) and to the context of musical performances (tenore, spartito, libretto,
etc.) taken from the book edited by Della Seta ([16]).
In this digital edition the internal and external bibliography is managed with two different lists:
TEI-ListWork and TEI-ListBibl. The first one concerns the musical compositions (opera,
musica da camera, etc.) made by Bellini and other authors (directly or indirectly) mentioned in
the letters considered significant in the life and works of the composer. Since Bellini refers, in
most cases, to his ongoing works, the term indicated in the list is conceptually associated with
Work or Expression according to the FRBR criteria and not to Manifestation or Item. However,
in TEI-ListWork we recorded a brief descriptive note extracted from Seminara's notes and
integrated with information on the first performance (theater, place and date) as well as
references to the Treccani and to Wikipedia pages. According to the MEI guidelines the
elements that identify the intellectual content in the musical context were also considered, such
as composer and librettist, as shown in Figure 4. On the other side, TEI-ListBibl contains the
bibliographical references about critical editions of letters and repertoires.


32 The MEI defines guidelines to encode musical documents in a machine-readable form. MEI closely
   mirrors the work done by text scholars in TEI. The schema is available at https://music-encoding.org/


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     Umanistica Digitale - ISSN:2532-8816 – n. 7, 2019




Figure 4: Bibliographic entry of Pirata Opera with composer and librettist elements of MEI.


As mentioned supra, the edition presents the digital reproduction of the manuscript in parallel
with the electronic transcription, based on a line-by-line synchronization. In order to fulfill the
production of the digital edition and its wide exploitation, all the phenomena upon the regions
of interest within the facsimile image are encoded and made available for further machine
processing: For example, the image areas yielded from the folding of the folio have been
thoroughly encoded. Specifically, the standard encoding mechanism, adopting zone elements
and points attribute for the definition of the regions of interest, has been used. This encoding
approach makes use of the TEI facsimile module encompassing the surface, graphic and zone
elements. The stamp zones, the address zones and those ones containing second and third
hands have been identified and recorded. In the facsimile images of LL1.16 letter, zones
corresponding to text lines, retro-recto and retro-verso without content, addressee, second hand,
third hand and stamps have been managed. The regions of interest encoded in the fronte-recto
folio are shown in Figure 5, as well as the line-based highlighting within the address area.
Thanks to this encoding of the image zones, different levels at different granularities of text-
image linking can be managed, enriching the edition by means of notes and references starting
from the facsimilar of the digital document. Concerning the image retrieval aspects, the API
implemented by the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) was used ([26]).
In such a way a detailed browsing of the correspondence content and context has been
achieved, linking the most relevant information (e.g. names entities, catalogs, bibliography) to
authoritative online datasets. Specifically, domain datasets such as RISM have been preferred to
the more general purpose datasets like Dbpedia.33



33 http://wiki.dbpedia.org/


                                                  36
    A. M. Del Grosso, E. Capizzi, S. Cristofaro, M. R. De Luca, E. Giovannetti, S. Marchi, G.
       Seminara, D. Spampinato – Bellini's Correspondence: a Digital Scholarly Edition for a
                                                                        Multimedia Museum




                     Figure 5: Fronte-recto of letter LL1.16 with address, second
                     hand, third hand and stamps.




       4.4. The digital scholarly environment
One of the most innovative aspects of BellinInRete digital correspondence is the work carried out
towards the production, indexing and visualization of the digital edition. To this end, a Web
prototype (Figure 6) has been implemented to process Bellini’s manuscripts based on the
specifications and encoding choices introduced supra.
As described in previous sections, the digitization process of Bellini's letters has started by
organizing the catalog into an electronic database and by acquiring facsimile scans of the
original manuscripts (as is typically done in these kinds of projects). The second phase of this
process involved the transcription and the digital encoding of the original documents, which
are part of the selected collection. Although the digital representation of the letters is basically
carried out by the aforementioned steps, the actual availability of the Bellini corpus cannot be
considered fulfilled if the entire corpus is not published using some kind of Internet service
([5]). In particular, both scholars and interested users, are nowadays in the habit of consulting
their sources by means of Web browsers through open access modalities ([6]). In the light of all
the above, it has been decided to publish the digital edition of Bellini’s correspondence by


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     Umanistica Digitale - ISSN:2532-8816 – n. 7, 2019

developing a Web environment based on two extant systems: 1) Omega Web services for
scholarly texts ([15]); 2) Edition Visualization Technology (EVT) for Web presentation of
scholarly texts ([22]). At the end of the development process, the two systems (described infra)
will cooperate in an integrated environment for digital scholarly editing suitable to produce,
exploit and disseminate Bellini’s correspondence ([14]).
Omega has been conceived as a modular digital environment for textual scholarship based on a
microkernel architecture and on a collection of Domain Specific Application Programming
Interfaces (DS-API). The development of Omega, carried out by a group of researchers and
technologists working in Pisa at the ILC, seeks to promote critical text enquiries by means of
computational tools able to efficiently model and handle textual, linguistic and semantic
analyses. In order to reach this challenging objective, the digital environment adopts the
Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (OOAD) paradigm and the Semantic Web technologies,
paying particular attention to involve textual experts in the development team, as dictated by
the Domain-Driven principles and patterns. In addition, this project takes into account both
the requirements of textual scholars and the needs of software developers. Indeed, the Omega
microkernel provides developers with the basic functionalities needed to load, index, annotate,
and query the domain entities for text representation and processing. These entities are reusable
text abstractions composed both by a set of minimal elements such as the source element, the
annotation element, the locus element and by a set of operations allowed upon these elements.
[12] In this way, it is possible to implement a flexible architecture of the digital environment by
adding several layers of functionality one over the other, which end, on the top of all, with a
layer of RESTful services.
The well-known EVT tool aims at publishing digital editions encoded by following the TEI-
XML guidelines.34 Although the principal objective of this tool is to help textual scholars in
their digital studies providing a lightweight and compact Web environment to create digital
editions, the project team has been developing special views and use-cases to arrange
requirements for the general public to better run and understand the content of the corpus.
EVT has been completely conceived and implemented with a client-side architecture and
comes with a user-friendly interface, exploiting different levels of editions (facsimile,
diplomatic, interpretative, and critical). Currently, EVT is freely available in two different
versions (EVT1 and EVT2) which have some differences both in terms of software architecture
and in terms of functionality. Although the EVT2 version has a modern Web design and is
designed to be more flexible compared to EVT1 version, this latter, although the core parser is
based only on the XSLT2.0 technology, does still implement more features than the newer one.
As a matter of fact, EVT team is hardly working on fulfilling the gap and achieving a feature
parity between the two versions. EVT project provides a fitting starting point for the Bellini
prototype as it is able to suitably manage TEI-encoded texts equipped with the corresponding
facsimile images. Furthermore, the EVT instance for BellinInRete digital correspondence provides
facilities specifically made for non-experts people such as didascalic notes, biographic
descriptions of cited people, explanation notes about places, events, organizations (named

34 EVT is born in the context of the Digital Vercelli Book project. It is hosted at the following web
   address: http://evt.labcd.unipi.it/


                                                   38
     A. M. Del Grosso, E. Capizzi, S. Cristofaro, M. R. De Luca, E. Giovannetti, S. Marchi, G.
        Seminara, D. Spampinato – Bellini's Correspondence: a Digital Scholarly Edition for a
                                                                         Multimedia Museum

entities), as well as exegetic comments about domain terminology e.g. words like “duetto” or
“atto” (see Figure 8 and Figure 9). Indeed, EVT will implement different views suitable for
generic museum visitors in Italian language.
To date, the ongoing Web prototype of the digital edition is publicly available and hosted on
the CNR servers. Figure 6 shows the current state of the environment considering only one
letter identified by the LL1.16 signature.35
Specifically, once the TEI-encoded document has been sent from the back-end (server-side, the
Omega sub-system) to the front-end (client-side, EVT sub-system) by calling an asynchronous
RESTful service, the whole presentation and analysis of the letters occurs on the browser side.
In particular, the features, provided by the EVT tool, have been customized to meet the
requirements of the BellinInRete project. Thanks to this customization work, the second version
of EVT has been equipped with a highly performing image viewer with zooming and tiling
capabilities made available by integrating the OpenSeaDragon JavaScript library. 36 Moreover,
other functionalities have been developed and integrated into the environment, which now
supports text-image linking, hotspots, and search capabilities. 37 These new enhancements have
also reduced the gap between the two current versions of EVT, reaching, in this way, a
substantial feature parity between them.




    Figure 6: Current prototype concerning the Bellini’s Correspondence Digital Edition: EVT.

35 The digital edition is available in a demo installation at the following web address:
   http://licodemo.ilc.cnr.it/bellini-in-rete/
36 OpenSeadragon is a Javascript library, compliant with the IIIF specifications with regards to the
   Image API, hosted on an open github repository. The project web address is available at the following
   link: https://openseadragon.github.io/
37 These features are existing features in the first version of EVT, but not yet available in the second
   version of the tool.


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     Umanistica Digitale - ISSN:2532-8816 – n. 7, 2019

Figure 7, Figure 8 and Figure 9 illustrate in details the prototype implemented so far. In fact,
throughout the Web platform it is currently possible to visualize data regarding the
correspondence description and the envelope modality, encoded, as described in the previous
sections, respectively by means of the correspDesc tagset within the profileDesc of the TEI header
and the front part of the text element. Furthermore, it is available a dedicated panel which
shows on the screen the entire description of both the primary source and the BellinInRete
digital correspondence. These data have been encoded through the msDesc tagset and the
projectDesc elements of the header.




Figure 7: Manuscript description (left hand box) and the envelope information (right hand box).


The digital environment also provides features to handle different kinds of lists such as name
entities (persons, places, organizations), bibliography (performance works, books, etc.), the
collection of the pages, the collection of the documents, and others. Moreover, resulting from
the work conducted within BellinInRete, it is now possible to link a high-resolution facsimile
image with the corresponding textual transcription accompanied with zooming, rotating, and
panning functionalities.
Finally, the Bellini’s correspondence digital edition provides also some sort of critical notes
besides the main text as well as the highlighting of parallel lines in the text and the
corresponding image, the handling of hotspots upon the selected image zones and a useful
search engine, thanks to which it is possible to query for text passages containing specific words
or specific characters ([8]).
The Graphical User Interface (GUI) in Figure 7 presents the description of the source
manuscript, on the left hand box and, alternatively, on the right hand box, the envelope


                                                  40
     A. M. Del Grosso, E. Capizzi, S. Cristofaro, M. R. De Luca, E. Giovannetti, S. Marchi, G.
        Seminara, D. Spampinato – Bellini's Correspondence: a Digital Scholarly Edition for a
                                                                         Multimedia Museum

information which was written on the fronte-verso surface of the original document. The
screenshot also shows the XML encoding of the Paris place name, plus the transcription of the
stamps data as well as the text which has been added by later hands (highlighted in green).
The screenshot in Figure 8 shows the main layout of the GUI from which scholars and
interested users can activate several interactive Web functionalities. For example, in the left-
hand box the Web environment provides users with a highly performing image viewer which,
using tiling capabilities, is able to handle scans with a great resolution. Moreover, the Graphical
User Interfaces allow scholars to synchronize text and image at line granularity as well as to
search keyword in contest (KWIC) thanks to a new search engine, developed from scratch
([8]), and to deepen the description for each encoded name entities. In fact, it is extremely
useful the change offered by the system to access the information encoded in the documents
every time that a term occurs within the text, where a traditional reader of printed-edition has
to search for the first occurrence of a lemma to retrieve the corresponding information.




Figure 8: Text-Image linking feature and Name entities description box.


Finally, Figure 9 illustrates some other useful features to automatically handle the hotspots
encoded upon the images as well as showing the notes that accompany the main text. The
project leaders have been paid a great deal of attention in encoding as much extratextual
descriptions as possible, thanks to which, by clicking on the highlighted terms, the digital
prototype provides end-users with references to people mentioned by Bellini, to Opera
institutions, to places, as well as to numerous technical "lemmas" that appear in the letters.
Particularly interesting is the case of the so-called voci (description entries) largely concerning


                                                  41
     Umanistica Digitale - ISSN:2532-8816 – n. 7, 2019

the morphology of the Italian opera house (aria, duetto, cabaletta), and consequently are easily
accessible also to readers not familiar with the vocabulary used by the Italian opera composers
of the nineteenth century.




Figure 9: Image hotspots and text notes.


In order to ease the maintenance and the long-term preservation of both the digital edition and
the project resources, open source technologies and well-received standard formats have been
adopted. By doing so, the risk of digital obsolescence is drastically reduced. Indeed, special
attention has been made to be compliant with the FAIR data principles [27] (Findability,
Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability), in order to support information management
and interchange along with data processing tasks. Moreover, we plan to publish the digital
edition under the CLARIN-IT umbrella 38 in order to take advantage of a pan-European
infrastructure devoted to maintain digital resources within the digital humanities field.
Ultimately, the Museum organization will be in charge of accounting matters related to the
preservation and updating issues of the digital edition and software packages.


        5. Conclusions and work in progress

This paper has described the stage reached so far regarding the production of the digital edition
concerning the Vincenzo Bellini’s correspondence. The research here illustrated pertains to the
“Museo Virtuale della Musica BellinInRete” project. In particular, this work has dealt with the
part of the project having to do with the corpus of Bellini’s letters, discussing the text encoding
scheme and editorial choices adopted, with a special reference to the structure of the epistolary

38 The Italian Clarin Web site is at the following URL: http://www.clarin-it.it/it


                                                   42
     A. M. Del Grosso, E. Capizzi, S. Cristofaro, M. R. De Luca, E. Giovannetti, S. Marchi, G.
        Seminara, D. Spampinato – Bellini's Correspondence: a Digital Scholarly Edition for a
                                                                         Multimedia Museum

grammar, the encoding of named entities as well as the parallel exploitation of the digital
documents by means of showing the transcribed text and the corresponding scan images. Two
subsystems composing the digital environment have been examined (i.e., Omega platform and
EVT Web tools).
With regards to the creation of the digital catalog, common vocabularies have been analyzed
which are the most useful to build authoritative datasets easily integrable into a Linked Open
Data perspective.
The activities involved in the digitization of the letters pave the way for numerous
enhancements. First and foremost it is planned to complete the digitization work and the text
encoding of all the selected materials, including the "minute" (draft manuscripts), which
Bellini used to write before the "formal" and fair manuscript. These documents are by all
means of great philological interest as they present author’s interventions with additions,
deletions, reconsiderations, and other morphological and stylistic shapings made by the
composer.
Concerning the terminology, and with a view to reusability, the Lesmu lexicon will be taken
into account ([20]). Lesmu is a computational Italian lexicon of music literature developed
with the contribution of ILC in the early 2000’s. Although the technology which it is based on
is outdated, the musicologists working at BellinInRete have found Lesmu a valuable resource,
since it allows to search over 22.500 lexicographical entries composed by more than three
million and six thousand indexed words. In Figure 10, for example, a screenshot of the old
interface to Lesmu shows the lexical entry sortita, appearing in the LL1.16 example letter of the
corpus.




Figure 10: The lexical entry “sortita” in Lesmu computational lexicon.



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     Umanistica Digitale - ISSN:2532-8816 – n. 7, 2019

Among the future works, we’d like to renew the Lesmu resource by reimplementing it with
state-of-the-art technologies and lexical models compliant to the Semantic Web, such as lemon
([17]).39 As for the interface to the lexicon we will adapt LexO ([2]), a Web-based collaborative
editor developed by ILC, to the needs of the Bellini lexicon. LexO, at its current stage of
development, allows a lexicographer (or terminologist) to create a resource constituted by one
or more lexica, each of which is composed of lexical entries with a lemma, a number of forms
(with morphological traits) and one or more lexical senses. Each sense can also be linked to a
concept of an ontology represented by means of the OWL language.
The tool that will make possible to link the terminological resource with the corresponding
occurrences within the selected corpus is the lemmatization. In fact, it is planned to develop a
module in charge of handling the words constituting the Bellini corpus with the intent to semi-
automatically encode the canonical form (lemma) of each term within the same TEI-encoded
document. The encoding may be done, for example, by using the term element of the TEI
schema. In order to implement such a linguistic and text analysis we will provide a KWIC (Key
Word In Context) functionality for classification purpose suggesting the most likely words or
phrases which are candidates to be encoded as terms, along with the corresponding
concordances presented in all the letters. Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches will
be adopted to solve this task. Once the lemmatization of candidate terms will be available, an
informative box will show the description of the highlighted words while browsing the letters
([13]).
As far as the development of the digital scholarly platform is concerned, new features,
corresponding to several use cases, have been planned to be implemented during the next steps
of BellinInRete digital correspondence. In particular, amongst other, it will be scheduled the
integration of two new modules within the Web application. The first one is conceived to
manage the whole corpus, encompassing the entire collection of the letters, by handling the
facsimile images of each folio. This latter functionality will be realized by putting together the
properties already available within the image viewer and the presentation API of the IIIF
technology. In this way, a general feature useful both to our project and to the general EVT
Web application will be added. The second module is conceived to handle the collation of the
texts and, consequently, the word alignment among the letters and the manuscript drafts
written by Bellini. This module will exploit the canonical text services (CTS) 40 and the
alignment component, implemented in the back-end side (Omega), as well as will integrate the
EVT functionality concerning the visualization of the parallel loci and the corresponding texts.


        Acknowledgement

This research project is partially funded by the “Patto per Catania” under the “Fondo Sviluppo
e Coesione 2014-2020: Piano per il Mezzogiorno”.


39 http://lemon-model.net/
40 http://cite-architecture.github.io/cts_spec/


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A. M. Del Grosso, E. Capizzi, S. Cristofaro, M. R. De Luca, E. Giovannetti, S. Marchi, G.
   Seminara, D. Spampinato – Bellini's Correspondence: a Digital Scholarly Edition for a
                                                                    Multimedia Museum


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Last access URLs: 12th September 2019.




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