Musisque Deoque: Text Retrieval on Critical Editionse

Abstract

The Musisque Deoque Project (MQDQ) aims at creating a digital archive of Latin poetry, from its origins to the late Italian Renaissance, equipped with critical apparatus and various exegetical and linguistic information. This project is focused on the study of synchronical and diachronical intertextuality as illustrated, e.g., in Cicu (2005). For this reason, we give strong attention to formal and material aspects of the text that actually played a relevant role in the poetical tradition. The fixed text of printed critical editions, aimed at the reconstruction as close as possible to the lost originals, provides just a snapshot of the tradition, which is intrisically dynamic, and gives to the modern reader a distorted image of what an ancient text was in fact. Fully searchable digital collections currently available are based on traditional critical editions, which are, as we just said, authoritarian texts; this authoritarianism is emphasized by the conversion from printed text to database, because usually the critical apparatus is cut away and there is no way for the reader to check a variant different from the one the editor put in the main text, often dubitanter, simply because he had to choose a variant. Limiting lexical searches to editor’s choices drives unavoidably both to false positives and false negatives, which need to be verified back on printed critical editions. False positives are due to possibly wrong emendations made by modern and contemporary scholars, provided by the text retrieval systems among the genuine occurrences, whereas false negatives are the likely variants excluded by editors biased by prejudices against specific linguistic and stylistic phenomena (such as the short-term repetiton, systematically emended by philologists of the last centuries). The purpose of Musisque Deoque is to overcome these limitations, retrieving not only the word keys quoted in the reference edition, but also the variants lying in the critical apparatus. In this way, further knowledge on the accomplished itinerary – from ancient operas during the subsequent ages until the Humanism and the Renaissance – can emerge.