The paper illustrates the LIBMOVIT project - - Libraries on the Move: Scholars, Books, Ideas Traveling in Italy in the 18th Century - whose main research focus is the European Eighteenth century ...socio-cultural framework in which the library as an institution acquired an historical, social, public and dynamic dimension. This context will be analysed through a study of the Eighteenth century sources connected to the learned journey experience of the Grand Tour, in particular those contained in the Angiolo Tursi collection - one of the largest travel literature collections in Italy - held at the Marciana national library in Venice. The paper presents the planned approach of the research: first, a classification and an organization of a corpus of relevant documents for the knowledge of travel literature in connection to the libraries world will be created; in particular, the sources will be identified, further bibliographical information will be added, and new sources will be integrated to the corpus and selected documents will be digitized. After that, the research will proceed through a double analysis – traditional and computational – of the texts collected in the corpus is to be developed. First, all the library and bibliographical aspects described by travellers will be studied according to the traditional approach in humanities research to collect important information about the history of libraries (location, decoration, catalogues, opening hours, access, collections, cited books and documents), the travellers and their companions (professions, nationality, reason to travel), the people met (scholars, librarians, superintendents) and the subjects and ideas discussed during the visits in the libraries. Second, the texts will be computationally analysed through several Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, starting from the automatic text recognition until arriving to more complex lexical and terminological analysis and Named Entity Recognition (NER). This work is meant to support the previously described qualitative study and will also allow to produce Linked open data about the domain entities (e.g. libraries, people, books) in view of their publication in the semantic web in order to ease and promote their exploration, visualisation and reuse.
The constant technological revolution that we have been witnessing for decades has affected all forms of communication and, consequently, has also involved the ‘recorded communication’ that pertains ...to bibliographic thought and action. Since the end of the nineteenth century and especially since the first decades of the twentieth century, this has led to a process of change in the structure of all scientific disciplines, including Bibliography. This process has had two fundamental consequences for bibliography: on the one hand, it has meant that bibliography as a meta-discipline is endowed with new instruments of investigation; on the other, it changed the disciplinary scope of bibliography itself, to the point where it has found itself specialised in a number of other derived disciplines. The need to clarify what happened is particularly felt in Italy, where even in the last century the documentary and bibliographical disciplines had an important development and debate, but it is also widely felt in the rest of the European context and beyond, as demonstrated by recent occasions of international scientific and conference comparison and as highlighted by some of the recent Italian studies of Bibliography and Information Sciences. In this contribution we discuss a methodological hypothesis to investigate the problem. In particular, it is argued that the solution to the problem is to be searched in a new methodological approach that includes both a qualitative survey of the main sources of the discipline in the Italian context – i.e., the traditional survey method of Bibliography – and a quantitative investigation necessarily conducted with the decisive help of the application of Linked Data technology to the most recent production of the discipline. The twofold approach would allow to give a concrete start to this disciplinary arrangement, reconstructing the most recent process of metamorphosis, identifying the junctions and the forms (methodologies, tools, and objectives) both in diachronic and synchronic terms.
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