{"word_count": 1332, "character_count": 9375}
di Antonello Fabio Caterino, bimestre settembre/ottobre 2018 (15 ottobre)PoLet500 aims to develop the first databaseof literary controversies in the Italian Cinquecento(http://www.nuovorinascimento.org/polet500/). The project addresses a gap inscholarship, since available studies on this topic are scant and not up-to-dateand intends to cross the traditional disciplinary boundaries. Thus, thisresearch will make available to scholars of many disciplines a wealth ofinformation insofar understudied if not totally neglected. We consider a literary controversy as aconflict of opinion between two or more literates about literary subjects ofdifferent nature, directly testified to by the texts that constitute the frameworkof the controversy or indirectly by the testimonies of contemporaries.This contrast may have the most diverseorigins: it can be actually an argument on a delicate subject, an “excuse” tovoice individual, political, ideological contrasts, or it can be merelyadherence to the literary topos ofthe invective, and thus an absolutely artificial artifact used to advertisingor self-referencing purposes etc.Literary arguments too are not limited tomere issues of poetics, language, and style, but they can well extend tocensorship, art, political, social and spiritual arguments. Moreover, theliterates were never alien to their social context. As a consequence, the studyof literary controversies is quintessentially interdisciplinary, and can offeruseful materials to scholars from across all disciplines.The fully questionable computer databasePoLet500 project finds its premise in a critical vacuum to fill. In fact,scientific literature is certainly not lacking in specific studies on various literary worksconcerning controversies ofthe sixteenth century, sometimes included in well-detailed biographicalstudies. On the other hand, there is little interest in collecting data in aperspective focused on the whole century and in drawing a state of the art onthe role of literary controversy in the Italian Cinquecento.The history of literary controversy studiesdates back to the end of the nineteenth century, when biographical and specificstudies of substantially good quality (i.e. the eighteenth-century Scrittori d’Italia by G. Mazzuchelli)were published. Yet, these studies merely offered a summary list of querelles or some quick reference tothem, lacking an overall interpretation. It was necessary to wait until the1940s, when the work of the Swiss scholar Giovanni Laini appeared (Polemiche letterarie del Cinquecento,Mendrisio, Stucchi, 1944). Nowadays, his work can be considered as the mostextensive and systematic work on the subject. Unfortunately, this work is quitecontroversial and flawed, showing little accuracy, too much confidence in theerudite bibliography of the previous century, and resorting to categories attimes insufficient to perform a proper indexing. This inevitably adds to thechronological question. Seventy years have elapsed since Giovanni Lainipublished his work in the mid-1940s. As a consequence, the volume does not takeinto account the specific bibliography that has since appeared on the singlecontroversies. A viable way to update this work could be reviewing the samplecases of controversies offered in the light of the new bibliography andinvestigation tools. However, some difficulties remain, linked to thereliability of the editions of the texts on which the controversy is based, andto the indexing of the same.Therefore, we intend not only to reconsiderthe various controversies, but to rethink the form of the study in itsentirety. To clarify, the book-form was only sufficient to contain all thebasic information for the analysis of the individual case. It is much more functionalto think of such a research as a job of filing. However, even the cards wouldneed indexes, and in any case would be related to a large number of texts whichwould be impossible to republish.So, at this point, Computer Science andDigital Humanities, are certainly helpful. The novelty of my approach residesin the building of cards - related to the various controversies - in telematicform. In this way, the indexing turns out to be simply and absolutely moreuser-friendly. I thought of a card, descriptive of thesingle controversy, divided into two sections: a general one, including thebasic information on the controversy and the main markings, and a moreparticular one, with specific bibliographic references.Therefore, the cards belong to severalcategories and consequently appear as a result of different queries (on atraditional book, once inserted a tab in a chapter – regardless of the index –you could not do anything but play on a series of references not practicalbetween cards and chapters).For the texts, I have resorted to themassive digitization process of projects such as Google Books, InternetArchive, Gallica etc.: it was necessary to add to the single sheet thereference to digitized sources. In this way one can quickly use something thatalready exists in the network and not just as metadata.At this point, as the IT solution lookslike the best methodology to form this kind of research, one needs to thinkabout creating a single card. The study of controversy, in the light of a commoncard is already a great step forward compared to Laini’s work: to ask the samequestions about all controversies, regardless of the entity and the fame of theprotagonists, means being systematic and treating the data with greaterobjectivity.The current state of the project’s artalready has some complete cards that can serve as a model to understand thefunctionality of the site. Here are the explanatory examples of the boardstructure, structured as follows:---- Section I, General-- Title-- History-- Topics-- Characters-- Synopsis -- Author of the voice---- Section II, References--- Bibliography-- Monograph-- Encyclopedic voices-- Book chapter / journal article--- Sources-- Epistolar-- Poetic-literary-- HistoricalThe PoLet500 archive will consist of agrowing number of cards linked to each other by the quality of theirintertextual components: the reference to the same topic or the same character,the sharing of bibliographic entries and the reference history. These are elementsthat are indexed in a taxonomic sense and that work on card collections, formedby user interaction with the archive.The user’s browsing capability is offeredthrough appropriate hyperlinks, which translate the intertextual frame of thecards into native web surfing elements.For this reason, the choice was to developa plan that did not envisage any kind of management content through thedatabase but would return the entire archive, whose connections between thecards were established by the quality of hypertext references.The two work’s levels of the software are:the actual archive, in which the cards are written; and the second level inwhich the cards assume the physiognomy of an appropriately transformed textfile into a web page.We chose to opt for simple and “portable”frame in defining the raw media file storage: unmarked text files withcomma-separated values (CSV) that form the frame of the cards, a general filecontaining the description and meta-description of the card and a file for thebibliographic references. The CSV files can be either text files orspreadsheets. They guarantee a long archival durability not only obtainablethrough the adoption of proprietary or closed storage software and paradigms.The use of textual material allows a certainscalability of the whole project both in terms of future developments and forproviding different outputs of the card. So, the original CSV file can beconverted into a Markdown+YAML file (native, is the file format used in thewebsite version that through dedicated template application, returns compiledweb pages with a user markup), JSON and XML in RSS and ATOM for feeds andothers, but still unprocessed at the moment.Due to its complexity, to the philological work and to the IT structure, PoLet500 also employs external collaborators. For this reason, it needed an IT architecture that supported a collaborative and decentralized approach and favored the division of tasks between scientific review, formal control and web publishing of the various materials.The development and co-ordination of such acomplex project requires, in addition to historical and philological skills,technical and computer expertise, especially in the fields of digitalhumanities (management and use of the above-mentioned technologies) and ItalianStudies. Although Polet500 is not intended as a popular science project, yetits files include a synopsis easily available to everybody through the indexingof the search engines (i.e. Google). This makes it possible to access theintroductory part of the card without delving into the technical and scientificreferences that constitutes the core section of the card. Thus, the archive hasa partially public dimension.The official institutional partner ofPoLet500 is the University of Molise (Dipartimentodi Scienze Umanistiche, Sociali e della Formazione). Finally, the project wasselected by EADH (European Association of Digital Humanities) among theprojects undertaken during the last five years that contribute meaningfully toDigital Humanities in Europe (https://eadh.org/projects/polet500-polemiche-letterarie-del-cinquecento-0).