Allacci Digitale: An Historical Dataset for Early Modern Italian Drama

Abstract

The Allacci Digitale dataset contains extended bibliographical information about more than 6000 early modern Italian plays. It is based upon a digitised copy of Leone Allacci’s Drammaturgia (2nd. ed. 1755), one of the most important historical catalogues for theatre in Italian. After performing OCR on its scanned version and manually correcting the outputs, we extracted relevant bibliographic fields through regex-based scripts, organised them in a tabular format, and cleaned it up with the software OpenRefine. The resulting database can be browsed through a dedicated website and used for quantitative investigations of Italian literary history.

Keywords

• early modern
• theatre
• italian
• literary history
• database