At the beginning of 2001 work started on the Commedia Project, a research effort which will transcribe in full seven manuscripts of Dante’s Divine Comedy in order to collate them and present them in an electronic format. As part of the prolegomena for the Project, we had to write its transcription guidelines, a task that appeared straight forward. However, as often happens, drafting the new guidelines developed into a task with implications beyond its immediate intended use. Initially, it was agreed that the Commedia Project transcription guidelines should be based on those of the Società Dantesca for their Dante Online website (http://www.danteonline.it/english/risorse.htm). It soon became evident that although the Società Dantesca's guidelines offered the advantage of having taken into consideration practical matters concerning spellings, punctuation, word division and the expansion of abbreviations, they did not deal with many other matters which were required for the Commedia Project. The Società Dantesca uses a form of symbolic representation—based on conventions—to convey the transcribers interpretation of what they believe to be in the manuscripts. For example, the Società Dantesca transcribes (Riccardiana 1005, Inferno, Canto I, 17):
<di +i0 del> These symbols are used to represent a deletion. In this case, the deletion was carried out by the main scribe of the text—or by an indistinguishable hand—indicated by 0. The complete set of symbols is enclosed in angle brackets. The first word, in this case ‘di’ is the one which was originally in the manuscript, and the last word—‘del’—is the one which replaced it. Next to the 0—representing the main hand or one which cannot be distinguished from it—the plus symbol is used—addition—and the letter ‘i’ which indicates that the correction has been introduced between the lines, i.e. it is interlinear. The Società Dantesca guidelines allow the possibility of marginal additions—‘m’—or additions within the line—for which they do not use any symbol. In this specific case, according to the transcription produced by the Società Dantesca, the manuscript has the word ‘di’ which has been substituted by the word ‘del,’ creating the phrase ‘del pianeta’ instead of the original reading ‘di pianeta.’ A second example can be found in Riccardiana 1005, Inferno, Canto I, 94:
<crede +i0 cride> Here, the original reading “crede” is followed by the identifiers for the position and the scribe, and at the end, the modified reading “cride,” again, all enclosed in angle brackets. The Società Dantesca system also permits a symbolic representation of marginal additions—[... +m1 o], an addition of the letter ‘o’ in the margin, which has been added by a second scribe (here represented by the number 1) to cover a lacuna—, interpolations or cancellations. Although these guidelines were useful as a base for the Commedia Project’s transcription system, a new encoding system was required for the encoding of the manuscripts. Other projects in which we are involved used very simple encoding systems. For example, the encoding for the Canterbury Tales Project’s publications uses [add][/add] for additions and [del][/del] for deletions. Thus, an interlinear addition in the Merchant's Tale, line 219 (CTP lineation system) was tagged:
tree [add]is[/add] neydir However, the verb is not in the same line as the other words, in fact, there is a caret indicating that the word ‘is’ is an addition to the line. Although the Canterbury Tales Project tags were useful when it started, they now seem to lack the flexibility which is required to present certain aspects of a scholarly edition. Given the nature of the corrections in the Commedia manuscripts, the Project required tags that were able to handle situations more complex than those of additions and deletions. One of the main aims of this project is to produce a CD-ROM with seven witnesses of the Commedia which Federico Sanguineti has identified as textually the most important. Sanguineti has already produced a critical edition of Dante’s Commedia, and the research he has already done is still being carried out at the Canterbury Tales Project. For this reason, the Commedia Project has a clearer conviction of which things are important and should be displayed in the CD-ROMs, and what the purposes of its transcriptions are, than the Canterbury Tales Project had when it was officially started in 1993. Because of this, it was possible to develop a encoding system which allows the distinction of different scribal hands or corrections made by the same scribe at different stages. Hitherto, the encoding of projects similar to the Commedia Project, such as the Canterbury Tales Project, attempted to present simultaneously both ‘what is in the manuscript’ as a series of additions or deletion, and ‘what is in the text’, as a series of distinct readings. However, after months of discussion with Klaus Wachtel (Institute for New Testament Research, Munster) about the transcription of corrections of the manuscripts of the Greek New Testament, new ideas about how to encode different textual stages started to emerge. These discussions were the base of the encoding system developed for the Commedia Project. The main goal of this new transcription system is to present a clear distinction between what is in the manuscript and how the transcriber interprets the different stages of development of the text. The Commedia Project encoding system aims to represent the different stages of variation in the text. When a transcriber finds a ‘place of variation’ in the manuscript, he or she can use the apparatus tag—[app][/app]. (We are using Collate-style encoding in the transcriptions: before publication, these will be translated into XML encoding). The apparatus tag contains three main components: the original reading (contained in the [orig][/orig] tag), the final reading (contained in a tag which specifies which copyist produced this [c1][/c1], [c2][/c2], [c3][/c3]), and what literally is in the manuscript (contained in the [lit][/lit] tag). If there are more than two stages in a correction, for example, in the case of having more than one corrector), these stages are presented in what is likely to be their successive order. The following example is taken from Riccardiana 1005, Inferno, Canto III, 9: The Commedia Project transcription guidelines indicate that we should transcribe as follows :
[app] [orig]dura[/orig] [c1]duro[/c1] [lit]dur[ud]a[/ud]o[/lit] [/app] Since the dot below the letter ‘a’ indicates deletion, the transcriber is faced with a place of variation—indicated in the transcription by the apparatus tag—[app][/app]. The first component inside the apparatus tag is the original reading—[orig]dura[/orig]. The second component is the final reading by the main hand, the reading [c1]duro[/c1]. These two components express different states of the text, but do not explain by which process the text change from one to the other. For this purpose we use the literal tag—[lit][/lit]—which indicates what literally is happening in the manuscript, in this case [lit]dur[ud]a[/ud]o[/lit], that is, literally the letters ‘d’ ‘u’ ‘r’ are present, followed by an ‘a’ which has been underdotted and an ‘o.’ In the literal tag, there is less space for interpretation and the transcriber is required to postpone judgment (for example, whether the underdotting of the ‘a’ indicates cancellation or not). In comparison with the lack of flexibility of the old encoding system of the Canterbury Tales Project, the Commedia Project's guidelines present several advantages. Firstly, the transcribers can defer interpretation of the stages of meaning, since the literal tag can be transcribed independently of the other components of the apparatus tag (this also gives the advantage of allowing the editor of a publication to make a final decision as to what happened at each individual place of variation). Secondly, the contents of the literal tag allows us to reconstruct what actually appears in a manuscript on the computer screen. Thirdly, the other components of the apparatus tag, such as original reading, final reading, and intermediate readings, can be collated separately from the rest of the text. The separate collation of multiple readings in a manuscript will be most useful when a scribe used a manuscript of different affiliation to correct his copy. In such cases, separate collation will allow the isolation of readings which originated in different manuscripts and which could hint at distinct affiliations in a single text. Separate collation might also be of help in cases in which conflation has occurred because a manuscript is corrected with another one from a different branch of a textual tradition. The encoding system of the Commedia Project has also been implemented by the Canterbury Tales Project (for publications to appear after the Miller’s Tale on CD-ROM, edited by Peter Robinson and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale on CD-ROM, edited by Paul Thomas) and, in the future, might be also adopted by other projects (notably, transcription of Greek New Testament manuscripts) for their transcriptions. This new encoding system also offers advantages when applied to authorial manuscripts, and although it was originally designed to deal with problems of corrections presented by medieval manuscripts, it should work as efficiently to distinguish different authorial versions of a particular text. This should translate into an easier reconstruction of these authorial versions and allow the distinction and separate reconstruction of different authorial versions.