A digital edition of the Commedia of Dante Alighieri, part two

This edition will provide full transcripts, images, collations and textual commentaries for seven key early texts of the Commedia, together with the full text of two important modern editions, and will be a landmark in Dante studies. This project will develop full electronic transcripts of the whole Commedia in these seven manuscripts (some 110,000 words in each). It will collate the seven manuscripts against each other and the two print editions, word by word, to create a full record of all agreements and disagreements, generating around one million pieces of information. All this information will then be analysed by a variety of computer means. Firstly, software originally devised by evolutionary biologists for the hypothesis of family groupings among related species will be used, to create genetic hypotheses about these seven manuscripts: which are related most closely to which? This software has been well-tested on other manuscript traditions and found to give useful results -- results which can confirm, enhance or modify the results achieved by traditional scholarly methods. Secondly, specialized database software (VBase) will be used to interrogate the distribution of variant readings: if there is evidence of a grouping within the seven, exactly what readings do the manuscripts of that group share which are not found among the other manuscripts?