Case Study · Historical Texts
Bartolomeo Scappi — Historical Text Recovery & Editorial QA
Bartolomeo Scappi’s Opera presents the kind of problem in which digitisation alone is not enough. Historical typography, large-scale textual structure and the need to preserve the relationship between scans and transcription require a controlled editorial workflow.
The work
The project combines source inspection, diplomatic transcription, structured textual units and editorial quality control.
Each stage remains linked to the historical source, allowing transcription choices, variants, sequence and provenance to be reviewed rather than hidden inside a finished text.
The workflow includes:
- source and scan verification;
- diplomatic transcription;
- structured text and TEI-oriented modelling;
- sequence and coverage control;
- detection of omissions and duplicates;
- terminology and metadata checks;
- editorial notes for variants and uncertainties;
- preservation of provenance and decision history.
Evidence
The verified working release covers 1,179 canonical textual units, with source mapping, sequence controls and provenance preserved across the corpus.
Its status remains explicitly a working editorial release: the evidence supports the integrity of the working corpus, not a claim that a definitive scholarly edition has already been published.
What this case demonstrates
Historical text recovery, large-corpus QA, structured transcription, provenance control and the ability to move from fragile source material toward a reliable editorial base.
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