Ernesto Monaci, Chair in Comparative Neolatin Studies (1875), Rettore at Sapienza (1885-1886), founder of the the Società Romana di Storia Patria (1876), the Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo (1883) is among the founders of both Romance Philology and modern palaeographical studies. He established the Rivista (1872) and Giornale di Filologia Romanza (1878); Studj Romanzi (1903) and the Archivio paleografico italiano (1882). Monaci was also member of Rome's City Council (1895-1902) and a consultant for the Ministry of Education in the definition of the new school curriculum and the establishment of an effective publicly owned school system, which makes him one of the key personalities in the institutional history of unified Italy. His personal archive - housed and curated by our Department - is a unique repository of our country's cultural history: it preserves 68 folders containing 1706 documents - private annotations, working notes, correspondence with Meyer, Paris, Ascoli, Pirandello, Croce, Gentile, Labriola, and the Minister for Education Coppino - as well as a rich personal library.
In 2018 we obtained a grant for the publication in digital form of a significant selection of such materials. We created a website, trained ourselves and doctoral students who joined the research group in marking up texts in XML-TEI, and in the semantic marking up of metadata. So far we edited digitally 175 selected items - Monaci's correspondence with Rajna (69 letters), Ascoli (81), De Lollis (24) - and his lecture courses on Leopardi (1906) and on the future of Romance Philology (1916/1917), with thorough commentaries. All the material is indexed (texts and metadata) and available in open access on the website (archiviomonaci.uniroma1.it), realized through a platform specially designed for the interrogation of texts marked up in TEI.
A new grant will allow us to reach our target of publishing all of the most significant documents preserved in the Archive (850 ca).
Our project aims at making available in digital form, materials hitherto unknown and unpublished, which will allow for their interrogation in ways traditional publication does not make possible.
It is herefore an innovative project in both contents and methodology. On the one hand, it will make available to the scholarly community new primary sources, arranged along the lines of research indicated above, and secondly the specific nature of the documents being edited, private papers and letters exchanged with the most prominent personalities of his time and age, belongs to a field of enquiry on the `scritture private¿ which has yielded important results in recentt scholarship. Digital editions - thanks to the tagging they allow in documents - is particularly suited for the publication of such materials. Private correspondence, due to its very nature, describes a network of people, places, institutions and texts which digital interrogation allows to explore and cross reference in a way traditional forms of publication do not. Moreover they are usually bulky, which makes publication in print often problematic. Correspondence extends along time, in a bidimensional fashion to which digitalization offers a third and fourth dimension of depth, bringing to the fore the network of correspondents and people involved in the communication, and the works (manuscripts, books) discussed, as well as the placed `mapped¿ by the letters and the institutions involved. All these dimensions can be tagged and codified, annotated and processed and thus identified by readers.
The research unit will investigate new possibilities in visualizing the data as in ¿Mapping the Republic of Letters¿ at Stanford University, through the analysis of big data tank to the tools provided by codification and semantic web. The main objective of the project is to disseminate and give added value to the great wealth of materials preserved in the Archive, a goal made possible by the grounwork preparation we carried out thanks to the 2018 grant in reordering the Archive, transcribing and identifying which materials to publish digitally; through the organization of the two Conferences and two exhibitions which have disseminated significantly interest and cooperation in the current project.
We are now ready - if the application is successful - to proceed swiftly to the actual digital publication of the 850 texts now ready for mark-up and to launch the digital version of the Archive.
Our project is also designed to accommodate the needs of the so-called Third Mission, a requirement for public institutions. It entails a commitment to the dissemination of the advancements of scholarship to be shared with the wider community, serving its cultural advancement.
The exhibitions in particular, and our partnership with the Comune di Soriano nel Cimino, Monaci¿s birthplace were especially designed to this end. The Comune di Soriano has been very active in promoting - especially in schools - activities to keep alive memory of Monaci's work and inheritance and is aiming at setting up a ¿Museo diffuso¿ in town ensuing from the exhibition held at the Accademia dei LIncei and the Istituto Storico per il Medioevo.
The idea is to design integrated itineraries to illustrate Monaci¿s work for the general public.
The digital publication of the catalogue and of the most important documents held in the Archive we hope will encourage scholars to use both the premises and the digital versions of the Archive and delve into it in order to deepen the knowledge of its holdings and of an important chapter of Italian recent cultural history.