The COVerLeSS project and new digital prospectives for the Italian Verismo

The COVerLeSS project and new digital prospectives for the Italian Verismo: The COVerLeSS project aims at preserving, valorising and analysing, in an integrated and open access Web environment, a searchable archive of the secondary literature (including reviews, journalistic and non-fiction texts) related to the literary production of the Italian Verismo. From a cultural point of view, the project is intended to provide an innovative concept of Verismo, thanks to its reverberations on the journalistic and non-fiction texts of the time and the way they contributed to building a precise image of the post-unification Southern Italy in social, cultural and economic terms. The research objectives will be achieved through three phases: (a) preservation: acquisition of the scanning of primary sources (mainly journals) according to the protocols established by the National Digitisation Plan, metadata, semi-automatic transcription via OCR and encoding in XML/TEI format; b) exploitation and use: creation of a Web environment with systems to display images, related transcriptions and user-friendly interfaces. This phase includes the design as well as the development of an Internet portal offering the visualisation of the primary sources, the search engine and the in-depth paths, starting from the identification of the target audience (students, scholars and general users); c) analysis. The strength of the project lies in its multidisciplinary nature, as it involves the field of Digital Humanities, and it promotes, in line with the objectives of the PNRR, the interaction between universities and research organisations.