Abstract:
With the present thesis, I would like to introduce, describe and motivate the proposal of a digital scholarly edition I have been working on over the last year. This project involves the transcription of an unpublished two-hour recording of a native speaker of the Cimbrian variety of the Seven Communities, Costantina Zotti, better known as Tanti. The recording, contained in a reel-to-reel audio tape, dates back to the 1980s and it constitutes an extremely rare source, especially considering that this variety of Cimbrian is nowadays extinct. Starting from an account of all the Cimbrian texts available, I will argue that this ¬¬document occupies a prominent position in the corpus of the language. The final outcome of this work will be a website containing the transcription of the text in question, accompanied by the audio material, a user-friendly critical apparatus and other relevant sections. In particular, the TEI markup of the text, included here in the appendix, will be accessible to the public, a decision in line with the most recent standards of the scientific community (Pierazzo, 2015; Bender, 2016). In the present work, I will illustrate the goals and the criteria of the encoding, focusing also on the reasons behind the choice of a digital environment. Finally, I will mention the potentialities of this ambitious project, which could play an important role in the field of the Cimbrian studies and of Digital Humanities in general.
