«A Shoreless Sea»: Modelling and Exploring Leone Allacci's Drammaturgia

Abstract

The paper showcases the digitisation, modelling, and exploration of a key text in the history of Italian theater: the Drammaturgia, compiled by the Roman scholar Leone Allacci (1666) and later expanded and revised by a group of intellectuals from Apostolo Zeno’s circle (1755). The work, containing a wealth of bibliographic information on more than 6,000 Italian-language plays, represents a crucial resource for reconstructing the evolution of early modern theatrical literature. To ensure accessibility for a broad scholarly public, the Drammaturgia has been converted into a structured database: after an automated transcription of the text, bibliographic data for each entry were extracted and, where possible, transformed into Linked Open Data. Direct queries on the database have been made possible through the construction of a dedicated website. To illustrate the potential of the Allacci Digitale, the concluding section of the article offers an example of quantitative exploration of its contents. In addition to providing an overview of the book market of the time, the collected data allow indeed for an in-depth investigation of the evolution of Italian theatrical literature under several respects (relationships between authors and publishers, geographical distribution of printing locations, features of the works’ titles).

Keywords

• digitization
• data modelling
• italian theatre
• leone allacci
• database
• aiucd2024