Reveduti, Correcti, Aprobati et Confirmati: The Digital Edition of the Statutes of Ascoli

Abstract of the poster "Reveduti, Correcti, Aprobati et Confirmati: The Digital Edition of the Statutes of Ascoli", presented at the XV Annual Conference of the Association for Humanities Computing and Digital Culture (AIUCD) "Digital Technologies and Public Engagement: Practices and Perspectives in the Digital Humanities", in Cagliari, Italy, 3–5 June 2026.

This paper presents the digital edition of the statutes of Ascoli, a normative corpus promulgated in 1377 and preserved in a printed edition of 1496. The project aims to make a significant source for the legal and institutional history of the city accessible through a digital edition, based on a full transcription encoded in XML according to the TEI guidelines. The edition highlights the structural complexity of the statutory text by making explicit references to people, places, events, and thematic domains, and provides differentiated modes of access for both specialist and non-specialist audiences. Particular attention is devoted to the sustainability and long-term preservation of the project by adopting a static architecture. Finally, an experiment in automated named entity recognition shows that large language models locate entity-bearing regions with reasonable accuracy, while span delimitation remains challenging, reflecting the complexity of the source’s vernacular register.