The growth of interest in epistolary texts over the last few decades has led to a flourishing of international research projects devoted to cataloguing, editing, and studying modern letters, in a collective and coordinated effort to better understand these materials. In this seminar, Dr Gianluca Valenti will introduce epistolarITA, a project dedicated to the edition and analysis of epistolary texts written in Italian between the 15th and 17th centuries and sent from the former Low Countries.
The epistolarITA project is divided into two principle axes:
- Critical editions of Italian letters, and
- Stylometric and semantic analysis of epistolary texts.
Having identified and begun work on some 500 letters written by personalities of the calibre of Alessandro Farnese, Antonio Doria, Ottavio Piccolomini, and Andrea Trevigi, work on the second of these axes is now beginning. In this phase, a database will be launched, through which users will be able to perform statistical analyses on a large epistolary corpus of letters edited in the framework of international projects mentioned above (such as Archilet, Cultures of Knowledge, EMLO, ePistolarium, EpistolART, Fondazione Memofonte, IDEA, Mapping the Republic of Letters, Medici Archive Project, and SKILLNET). The epistolarITA algorithm will use techniques such as TF-IDF, Word2Vec, and Named-Entity Recognition to help users to discover new connections, explore new avenues of research, and find new interpretations in the network of the Republic of letters.
Dr Gianluca Valenti is a Maître de Conférences and Lecteur at Liège Université, where he is a member of the Faculté de Philosophie et lettres. He is widely published in the field of epistolary texts and digital approaches to textual analysis.
Presented by DiSc, the seminar will be introduced by Professor Howard Hotson and will include time for questions, discussion, and coffee.
