CLIO. Corpora for Italian Lyric of the Origins
The project aims at improving the conditions of research in philological, linguistic and historical-literary studies with a series of new or existing (but strongly updated and restructured) tools dedicated to Italian poetry of the Origins, thanks to the proven synergy between Siena University for foreigners and OVI-CNR and to the international network of collaborations that the project will contribute to support, as well as to a strong investment in training.
The core of the project will be the radical renewal of the Corpus LirIO, a sectorial corpus comprising texts of Italian poetry prior to the 15th century and now available in a structure that has not been updated since 2013. In this decade the Corpus OVI dell'Italiano antico, the database that collects texts written in any Italo-Romance variety before the 14th century for almost 30 million words, for the benefit of the entire scientific community, has been profoundly updated from a philological and IT point of view (+946 texts, +6,809,200 occurrences compared to 2013, a new bibliographic platform to develop interoperability with repertories on the tradition of texts, etc.).
The new version of the Corpus LirIO will not only inherit the novelties of the Corpus OVI (with new texts and new editions), but above all it will present a completely renewed and autonomous architecture compared to the Corpus OVI: each poem will correspond to a textual unit with more specific metadata in terms of chronology, attribution, metrical genre, etc. than the structure in which several pieces are collected in the same text because they were published by the same editor; this partition will allow full interoperability with the LIO. Lirica italiana delle Origini database; the corpus will be lemmatized to create the first digital rhyming dictionary of poetry of the Origins.
In addition to this engagement, the CLIO project will support the updating of the already mentioned LIO with bibliographic surveys and philological research in libraries with new codicological descriptions.
Furthermore, the CLIO project will produce a new corpus dedicated to metrical and rhetorical treatises on vernacular poetry in the Middle Ages: the Corpus TraMA. Trattati metrici antichi will be multilingual, Latin and vernacular, with a sector-specific lemmatization on metrical and rhetorical lexicon.
This set of digital tools, which can be accessed free of charge, will constitute a fundamental hub for research into the earliest Italian poetic tradition, bringing together the most diverse interests: philological, literary, linguistic, metrical, stylistic and palaeographic-codicological.