The Linguistic Archive of Renaissance Italian Writers aims to build a solid and reliable database in order to permit the analysis of spelling and morphosyntactic features of Italian texts written between 1450 and 1550. The idea is to create a linguistic section integrated into ALI Autografi dei letterati italiani online site (`Autographs of Italian writers online': http://www.autografi.net), that already hosts more than 40.000 HD images.
The project foresees a double transcription for each manuscript (these, thanks by an agreement with ALI, will be visualized along with HD images of the transcribed autographs): the interpretative one will guarantee readability, preserving the graphic and phono-morphological features; the diplomatic one will bring out aspects that are usually normalized in modern editions.
Scholars will be able to search into the interpretative transcripts and also to focus on a single document (thanks to an open source software, adapted to the targets of the project, displaying the two kinds of transcript next to the HD image of the autograph). In this way, it will be possibile to gather linguistic data that are to date very difficult to carry out on 15th and 16th century Italian language.
