Dionisio Capuano, Mission: It's Possible, "Blow Up" magazine, 2005-2011: Complete Corpus of a Column Devoted to Reviews of Imaginary Records

This dataset provides the complete corpus of Dionisio Capuano’s “Mission: It’s Possible” column, published in the Italian music magazine Blow Up between February 2005 and December 2011 (issues 81-163). The column was devoted to reviews of imaginary records: fictional phonographic releases attributed, in almost all cases, to actually existing artists and presented through the discursive conventions of music criticism.

The corpus comprises 74 published instalments. Issues 131 (April 2009) and 157 (June 2011) are not documentary gaps: the “Mission: It’s Possible” column did not appear in those two issues.

The TXT file contains the complete corpus in its original Italian, including the notes accompanying the individual instalments. Editorial information, corpus metadata and documentation supplied for this edition are in English. The XLSX file provides a structured overview of the corpus, including stable corpus IDs (MIP001-MIP074), issue numbers and dates, artists/projects, imaginary record titles, transcription sources, word counts, and analytical metadata used for corpus-level research.

Instalments from issues 81-119 were transcribed from a PDF with selectable text; later instalments were reconstructed from photographs of the original magazine pages. Manifest OCR and typographical artefacts have been normalised, while doubtful readings have not been conjecturally rewritten. The corpus contains approximately 75,989 words, including the original notes and excluding editorial metadata.

The dataset was prepared and edited by Gabriele Marino for research on uphonic criticism, potential discography, music criticism and quantitative semiotics.