About the database

Purpose
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    The database contains an exact, detailed and systematic representation of the sound and metre of the major narrative poems of the Italian Middle Ages and Renaissance. Its purpose is to provide a firm evidence base for the analysis, interpretation and comparison of specific structures, and combinations of structures, across this substantial corpus of related texts (162,125 lines of verse). It also aims to develop and test the capacity of computer-based processes to serve the purposes of literary scholarship.

    Features of sound and metre do not work in isolation, but as part of a system. In the famous last line of Canto 5 of Inferno

    E caddi come corpo morto cade

    the impact depends partly on the repetition of four initial Cs (see Phonemes), partly on the chiastic structure of the accented vowels(see Accented vowels), partly on the even iambic rhythm (see Rhythm), partly on the fact that each accent begins a new two-syllable word (see Word accents), as well as on the position of the line (see Position). The database allows all such features, and others, to be searched for in combination.  

    History
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    The present database system is based on digital materials developed by David Robey over some two decades, at the Universities of Oxford, Manchester and Reading, for a series of print publications on sound and metre in medieval and Renaissance Italian narrative poetry (see Publications below). It is an extended and developed version of a resource first published in 2003 as Italian narrative poetry of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, an MS Access database deposited with the Arts and Humanities Data Service (http://www.ahds.ac.uk/). The present system makes this resource available on-line, with the addition of new data and documentation.

    The work began with a study of alliterations in Dante, Petrarch and Tasso, published in 1988.  This resulted from the realization that, because of the unusually regular nature of Italian orthography, a computer analysis of Dante's text could be a powerful aid for the study of effects of language in the Divine Comedy and other poems, because it could translate the written text more or less automatically into a representation of its constituent sounds or phonemes. The same realization then led to a study of rhyme on a similar basis, this time in Dante and all the major narrative poems of the Renaissance. 

    At these stages the work involved a combination of scholarly and technological effort, but, once the rules for digital processing had been developed, the degree of manual intervention was very limited; more details are given in the Technical method sections of the related information pages. Moving on to the next stage, the study of rhythm and metre, presented a much greater scholarly challenge and required a much greater degree of manual intervention in the digital process. The challenge was to find a systematic and consistent way of representing accentual rhythm in scholarly form, when rhythm in poetry is necessarily a matter of interpretation, judgement and performance; again more details are given in the related information page. All theses issues are discussed at length in Robey's Sound and Structure in the 'Divine Comedy' (OUP, 2000), which was based on a digital version of Dante's poem systematically marked up in terms of syllable divisions and accent.

    With the help of of two research assistants funded by an AHRB Research Grant for 1999-2000, the treatment of rhythm was extended from the Divine Comedy to the later narrative poems. The output from this is the intellectual heart of the present database, whose claim to research status rests significantly on the development and implementation of a consistent scholarly system for the representation of rhythm and metre across such a substantial range of texts.

    Significant contributions towards the development of this resource have therefore been made by the two research assistants mentioned above, Annalisa Cipollone and Paola Nasti. Before then Marco Dorigatti carried out extensive technical and philological work on the machine-readable texts of Pulci and Boiardo used by the database (see the related documentation). See also further Acknowledgements below.

    Technology
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    The computing techniques used in the database will be described in more detail in the relevant information pages, but it has to be said that they are in some ways a little eccentric, because to generate the data from the texts they have employed a programming language, SPITBOL, which is particularly well suited to this kind of work, but which is, perhaps regrettably, not widely used nowadays, despite excellent adaptations from mainframe to micro-computer use, and then from MS DOS to Windows. More generally, the techniques are somewhat removed from the mainstream of contemporary literary and linguistic computing, which tends to use publicly available software and database resources, rather than engaging in private programming for highly specific purposes.

    SPITBOL programmes have also been used to assemble the data for inclusion in the present system, but while the preparation and assembly processes have involved a good deal of programming, the database and interface use proprietary technologies. The data resides in an MS SQL server, and the data access pages have been prepared in MS FrontPage, though with a considerable amount of adaptation and adjustment.

    Database documentation
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    The full database system is made up of the database on the SQL server plus the following forms, information pages and text files:

    Forms

    Information pages

    Text files

    Publications
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    The following print publications by David Robey have drawn on parts of the analytical material included in the database, which is now made available in full for the first time through the present system:

    Acknowledgements
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    In addition to those mentioned above under History, I am greatly indebted to Peter Brand, Tony Oldcorn, the late Antonio Zampolli and others for substantial help in the acquisition, creation, or revision of these texts. I have also had extensive technical and other help from the Oxford University Computing Service, Reading University IT Services, and Professor Susan Hockey. Warm thanks are also due to the British Academy and the then Humanities Research Board and Arts and Humanities Research Board for grants that made much of this work possible.

    Contact
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    For further information, contact David Robey at d.j.b.robey@reading.ac.uk. Comments on and discussion of the database are most welcome.

    © University of Reading 2007Last revised on 23 December 2007