The Petrarchive (ed. Storey, Walsh and Magni) is an open access rich-text digital edition of Petrarch’s songbook Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Rvf). The website does not reproduce in OCR other editions but proposes a new digital way of visualizing, studying and teaching Petrarch’s work by offering different levels of visualization of the texts (facsimile high-quality images of all the chartae of the partial holograph Vaticano Latino 3195, its complete diplomatic transcriptions and edited forms, a prototype for a new eleven-section commentary including a new English translation), as well as multiple indices and tools to access the diverse strata of the work’s composition.
The Petrarchive is designed as a tool both to introduce Petrarch’s collection—a collection that continues to influence modern cultures in many languages—and to give advanced users access to Petrarch’s “original” text and an extensive “material” commentary for each poem. Among the most innovative aspects of the project is its visual indexes. The project proposes, in fact, different ways of accessing Petrarch’s 366 poems, among which: 1) Text indices arranged and searchable by: a) poem number (in the physical order of Petrarch’s last version); b) alphabetical order of the poems (including retrievable palimpsests); c) genres (sonnets, sestinas, canzoni, ballate and madrigals); d) line graph of each charta. 2) A visual index of the external order and internal arrangement in line graph form of each charta 3) A visual index of the chartae arranged by the fascicle structure of Vatican Latino 3195