Paolo Bufalini (Rome, 1915-2001), Italian politician and partisan, was one of the protagonists of post-WWII politics in Italy. Graduated in law, he held leading positions in the Italian Communist Party (PCI) besides being a member of the Parliament and of the Senate of the Republic uninterruptedly from 1963 to 1992. Alongside politics, Bufalini cultivated his interest in classics, and especially Latin literature, becoming a renowned translator of Horace's poetry.
The private notebook, which Bufalini titled Appunti 1981–1991 (transl. Notes 1981–1991), contains textual excerpts from Latin, Italian and European literature gathered over ten years of political and intellectual life, and accompanied by translations and comments.
The notebook features 145 pages and two loose sheets.
The semantic digital scholarly edition of Paolo Bufalini's notebook is a project of the Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies (FICLIT) and of the Digital Humanities Advanced Research Centre (/DH.ARC) of the University of Bologna.
The primary aims of the edition are to identify, analyse and enhance the intratextual and extratextual relations – otherwise implicit, given the private nature of the notebook – which characterize the texts of the Appunti. The results are presented as a knowledge graph where nodes represent the entities of the edition (quotes, comments, translations, authors, works, persons, places, etc.) and arcs represent different types of relations between such entities. The graph is formalized using Semantic Web and Linked Open Data (LOD) technologies: from a network of documents, the edition becomes a network of entities which are univocally identified by means of URIs and interconnected through typed links, which are also identified by means of URIs.
From Digital Edition, users can view the transcription and the facsimiles of Paolo Bufalini's notebook. In addition, they can also search for relations between persons, works, quoted texts, translations, comments.
The edition is enriched by semantic indexes which users can consult in the form of traditional lists or as graphical visualizations.
Il Digital Humanities Advanced Research Centre (/DH.arc) fa parte del Dipartimento di Filologia Classica e Italianistica (FICLIT) dell'Università di Bologna. /DH.arc riunisce studenti, ricercatori, personale IT e professori provenienti dal FICLIT, dal DISI (Dipartimento di Informatica e Ingegneria) e da diverse strutture affiliate a quest'ultimo, all'interno dell'Università di Bologna. Il Centro supporta studiosi e istituzioni nella progettazione, nello sviluppo e nel mantenimento di progetti di ricerca nell'ambito delle DH.
