Voci dall’Inferno: Dante per esprimere l’indicibile

This paper presents the ongoing developments of the project Voci dall’Inferno, which is structured around two integrated objectives: (a) the digitization and encoding of the first digital corpus of non-literary testimonies by Lager survivors; (b) the identification, quantification, and analysis of Dante’s lexicon and imagery within those testimonies. On the one hand, the creation of the digital corpus aims to collect, preserve, and enhance of non-literary testimonies; on the other, the project documents the use of computational tools and methods for analyzing the digitized materials. Among the project’s most significant outcomes is the web application Voci dall’Inferno, designed to catalogue, browse, and analyze the archived testimonies, as well as to systematically detect and study the presence of Dante’s vocabulary in the corpus. The contribution is structured in three sections. The first investigates, from a historical-literary and humanistic perspective, the reasons why Dante became a privileged reference for many survivors to express the experience of the Lager. The second and third sections address the project’s technical components: the second focuses on the XML/TEI encoding of the testimonies, while the third outlines the current state of development of the Voci dall’Inferno web platform. The contribution also incorporates results from Elvira Mercatanti’s master’s thesis in Digital Humanities [13].