Risorse e sfide per la collazione automatica di testi medievali

Abstract

Collation is one of the first philological activities for which the use of computers has been considered. Already during the 60’s, algorithms for semi-automatic collation came to light. This article pursues their development, focusing on a specific type of materials: medieval vernacular texts. The linguistic resources available nowadays for these materials allow to design a collation pipeline, following the architecture proposed by the Gothenburg model: the text of each witness is annotated with linguistic information; the alignment is made on the lemma, in order to neutralize the orthographic variation; eventually, the linguistic annotation is used to identify categories of variants. While most of the steps in this pipeline have been conceived earlier in the history of semi-automatic collation, they were partially carried out manually; the possibility of automatize them might influence the adoption of computers for the collation of medieval vernacular texts.