Cosimo Bartoli's Correspondence and Newsletters (1562-1572): Transcriptions and Metadata

This repository contains the transcriptions and metadata of letters and newsletters written by Cosimo Bartoli, the official agent of the Duke of Tuscany in Venice, from 1562 to 1572. The original documents are preserved in the Florence State Archives, primarily in the Mediceo del Principato collection.

The documents were transcribed automatically using the Transkribus software. The text recognition model was specifically trained on documents written by Cosimo Bartoli, his nephew Curzio Bartoli and his secretary Giovanni Gavazzo, resulting in a high degree of accuracy (96.80%). The trained model does not automatically expand abbreviations. A script was employed to replace the abbreviations with their expansions. The model Cosimo Bartoli’s Italian Humanistic and Cursive Scripts (1562-1572) is publicly available and can be used by any registered Transkribus user.

This digital edition was created by Sara Mansutti as part of her PhD project within the EURONEWS Project at University College Cork. The automated transcriptions of 628 pages have been corrected and tagged by volunteers in a digitally-enabled participatory project. Those pages are marked as "Reviewed," while the others remain unreviewed.

I would like to extend my gratitude to all the participants for their time and dedication: Borna, Adriano, Irene, Sabina, Margherita, Miriam, Marco, Sue, Antonella, Rachel, Alba, Céline, Brenna, Federica, Brendan, Rose, Emma, Wouter, Roberto, Tayra, Doug, Davide, Michele, and Zeynep.

Contents of the Repository:

Markdown files (md) used for the digital edition, hosted at https://smansutti.github.io/cosimobartoli/.

CSV file with metadata for each document. The metadata are tailored to three types of documents (Letter, Newsletter, and Other).

PAGE XML files with tags for abbreviations (abbrev) and newsletter hubs and dates (place_date_avvisi).

TEI XML files with tags for abbreviations (abbrev) and newsletter hubs and dates (place_date_avvisi).

CSV file with the individuals Bartoli interacted with.

CSV file with the hubs mentioned in the handwritten newsletters.