From Print to Digital and Beyond: The Retrodigitization of a Historical Dictionary of Italian as a Hybrid Lexical Resource

This paper presents the retrodigitization project of the Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana (GDLI), the largest historical dictionary of the Italian language. The GDLI’s 23,000 pages - originally designed for human consultation - constitute an exceptional repository of linguistic and cultural-historical information, while posing significant challenges to large-scale digitization and data structuring. The project, still ongoing, will result in the development of a set of interoperable and interlinked resources: (i) a TEI-XML edition of the dictionary text, encoding its complex lexicographic structure; (ii) an annotated corpus of the quoted examples, enabling linguistic and historical research across centuries; and (iii) a database of quoted authors and works. Together, these components form a hybrid lexical resource that establishes the foundations for innovative and advanced modes of accessing and exploring the rich and multifaceted content of this historical dictionary.