Laboratory of digital elaboration and reproduction of texts

The activity of the Laboratory has, so far, consisted in the creation of the DigilibLT project, Digital Library of Late Antiquity Latin Literature, funded by the Piedmont Region following a competitive tender, in which a specific research group works, and in collaboration in the GeoLat project, Geography for Latin literature.

Various activities are related to the DigilibLT project, DigilibLT, Biblioteca digitale della letteratura latina tardoantica, which were activated in 2010 thanks to a grant from the Piedmont Region following a competitive tender, belong to the Laboratory. The Cassa di Risparmio di Vercelli Foundation then promoted two other lines of funding, the first aimed at the inclusion in the digital library of Latin Grammars, while the second, recently activated, supports the expansion of the database with the Late Antiquity legal heritage. The laboratory also hosted several cycles of School/Work Project, implemented in collaboration with local high schools.

The laboratory is equipped with an Atiz professional scanner and three hi-tech computers. The scanner consists of a shielded structure on which two professional cameras are mounted and a V-shaped plane on which the open book is placed (texts and documents up to A2 format can be scanned by lowering the Plexiglas cover of the V-shaped plane; two professional cameras automatically take two images of the pages of the book). The cold light lighting makes the equipment also suitable for the reproduction of valuable books and ancient texts. A screen on the bottom of the scanner, behind the V-shaped plane, allows you to gradually check the outcome of the work, which is automatically saved on the connected computers.

The supplied software (BookDrive Capture for capturing images and BookDrive Editor for retouching and improving the quality of the same) allow you to manage the photographs of the pages by optimizing the images and merging them into a file in PDF format. From the PDF, through a character recognition program (Nuance Omnipage is currently adopted), an editable text is obtained and the PDF serves as a comparison to check its correctness.

These professors belong to the laboratory:

• Raffaella Tabacco, 
• Maurizio Lana, 
• Luigi Battezzato, 
• Gabriella Vanotti; 
• Alice Borgna (RTD-A), 
• Nadia Rosso (research fellow), 
• Chiara Miglietta (PhD researcher).

Location: ​Palazzo Tartara (ground floor), via G. Ferraris 109 Vercelli - tel. 0161228262/205