In the last few years the amount of manuscripts digitized and made available on the Web has been constantly increasing. However, there is still a considarable lack of results concerning both the explicitation of their content and the tools developed to make it available. In addition, the relationship between the physical nature of the documents and their digital format is often lost.
This is why in the Clavius on the Web project the two manuscripts containing the correspondence were completely restored before the digitization process. The objective of the Clavius on the Web project is to develop a Web platform exposing a selection of Christophorus Clavius letters along with three different levels of analysis: linguistic, lexical and semantic.
The multilayered annotation of the corpus involves a XML-TEI encoding followed by a tokenization step where each token is univocally identified through a CTS urn notation and then associated to a part-of-speech and a lemma. The text is lexically and semantically annotated on the basis of a lexicon and a domain ontology, the former structuring the most relevant terms occurring in the text and the latter representing the domain entities of interest (e.g. people, places, etc.). Moreover, each entity is connected to linked and non linked resources, including DBpedia and VIAF. Finally, the results of the three layers of analysis are gathered and shown through interactive visualization and storytelling techniques. At the end of the first two years of the project a workshop was organized, where high-school students tested the digital tools developed in Clavius on the web and had the opportunity of visiting the Archive and seeing the manuscripts there preserved.