=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3161/poster5
|storemode=property
|title=The Pietro Gradenigo Database: An Approach to the Transcription and Analysis of the Notatori (poster)
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3161/poster5.pdf
|volume=Vol-3161
|authors=Daniel Zilio,Chiara Bombardini
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/mdtt/ZilioB22
}}
==The Pietro Gradenigo Database: An Approach to the Transcription and Analysis of the Notatori (poster)==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3161/poster5.pdf
The Pietro Gradenigo Database: An Approach to
the Transcription and Analysis of the Notatori
Daniel Zilioa , Chiara Bombardinib
Department of Cultural Heritage, University of Padua, Piazza Capitaniato 7, Padua, Italy
Abstract
The Notatori are 38 manuscripts preserved in Museo Correr Library in Venice. They are still an essential
point of reference for the study of Serenissima in the XVIII century, because the nobleman Pietro
Gradenigo recorded over 22,000 reports concerning different disciplines and news about Venice in them.
In order to make them available to researchers and preserve it, we created the Portale Gradenigo: a
dedicated web portal that relies on finding and inserting content.
Keywords
Digital library, Pietro Gradenigo, Manuscripts, Database
1. The Notatori
Between 1748 and 1773, the Venetian nobleman Pietro Gradenigo wrote his famous Notatori: 38
manuscripts today held in the Museo Correr Library in Venice – where he recorded the most
important events in Venice and the neighboring territories. The notes are in chronological order.
The Notatori resemble a diary containing over 22,000 reports concerning different disciplines –
history, economics, politics, art, – and news. At times, facts of daily life were the pretext for
deepening the history and culture of Veneto. Pietro Gradenigo spent most of his life searching
for documents about Venice. He frequented libraries and archives and transcribed many papers
in his manuscripts with the help of his collaborators. His intention was to protect the historical
memory and enhance the glorious past of Venice. For this reason, Gradenigo invited friends and
colleagues to attend his library and consult what was contained in his precious manuscripts.
2. Method
Recently the Notatori have been examined by scholars of specific disciplinary fields (for e.g.
music and applied arts), in support of their research [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], but the only study entirely
dedicated to them is Notizie d’arte tratte dai Notatori e dagli Annali del N.H. Pietro Gradenigo [6],
edited by Lina Livan in 1942, that contains the transcription of some art notes. Given the
importance of this source, the Notatori were the subject of a doctoral thesis of History, criticism
and conservation of cultural heritage at the University of Padua [7], where the figure of Pietro
1st International Conference on “Multilingual Digital Terminology Today. Design, representation formats, and
management systems”, June 16–17, 2022, Padua, Italy
" daniel.zilio@unipd.it (D. Zilio); chiara.bombardini@phd.unipd.it (C. Bombardini)
0000-0001-7107-8858 (D. Zilio); 0000-0001-5505-6640 (C. Bombardini)
© 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
CEUR
Workshop
Proceedings
http://ceur-ws.org
ISSN 1613-0073
CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
Figure 1: Entity-Relationship schema of the database
Gradenigo and his working method were examined. Especially the notes of historical-artistic
subject have been analyzed, first dividing them by a topic, for e.g., architecture, painting,
sculpture, goldsmith, archaeology, graphic, and so forth, then, associating to each ones a group
of keywords.
3. Database
In order to make this collection available to researchers and preserve it, a relational database has
been developed. This includes the transcriptions of each note’s original texts and an additional
corpus of associated metadata. In the Figure 1 the Entity-Relationship model used to represent
the structure. To populate and to retrieve the information contained in the database we created
the so-called Portale Gradenigo: a dedicated web portal which relies on finding and inserting
content. This web portal has been designed to be easy to learn and fast to use, including a
simple system of word-matching search engine.
In addition to the topic, each note is associated with one or more keywords, where elements
like persons, places and items are reported. This is particularly useful when foreign names in
the text are reported in an Italian version or there are terms in Venetian dialect. The purpose of
keywords is to make the text even more accessible. Assigning a topic or keyword also makes a
note understandable or provides further information. For example, in some notes, Gradenigo did
not express the name of the author of a painting or an engraving but, if this is known, it can be
added like keyword. Often, in addition to the notes, Gradenigo put references to other notes of
a similar subject from the Notatori or other manuscripts of his where to deepen the topic. In the
Portale were also inserted these references plus others proposed by us on the basis of an analysis
of the entire manuscript production of Gradenigo. For example, Gradenigo recorded that Venice
donated a medal to the ambassador Caracciolo in 1749 in the Notatori and in other manuscripts,
so in the Portal have been added references to all the manuscripts of Gradenigo where this
news is present. Pietro also described a print that Giambattista Piazzetta engraved to celebrate
this event. This information has also been included in the Portal with a link to the online cat-
alogue of the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia (MUVE) where a copy of this engraving is kept.
Using the topic and the keyword metadata it is also possible to show only the notes asso-
ciated to specific categories. Being the text transcription make using HTML tags, it is possible
in this way preserve specific annotations presented in the original text and show them in the
browser. This tool permits to researches to filter the notes of interest, that would otherwise be
difficult to locate. To assign a topic or a keyword also allows to make a note understandable or
to have further information, for example in some cases Gradenigo did not express the name
of the author of a painting or an engraving. Again Portale Gradenigo give us the possibility
to analyzing the connections and the working practice of Pietro Gradenigo: a note may be
important for the information it contains or to identify the interests of the author.
4. Conclusion and Future Works
In the next steps we would like to include into the Portale all the 22,000 news contained in the
Notatori and to add the topics hitherto excluded, like economy, politics, music, numismatics, and
so forth. We hope that the Portale will become an instrument to obtain the complete digitisation
of the collection. To accomplish this aim we would like to use it to index all the manuscripts
of Pietro Gradenigo: around 300 titles [8], 230 of them are preserved in Museo Correr Library.
Some manuscripts contain notes like in the Notatori, others are chronicles, genealogies, reports,
etc., but the Portale can adapt to different needs.
Another application is the design of an automatic topic classification. It aims to develop a
system which automatically recognizes the newest notes added to the database. Actually the
archive contains about 3,500 notes, each manually classified, so the ten percent of the total of
the estimated numbers of notes. Being the different reports of interest for a large spectrum of
researchers (e.g., historians of art, economist, historian, etc.) it could be important to subdivided
the records immediately when the text is recorded. For this reason we are developing a Naive
Bayes text classification system, which aims to assist during the transcription process, providing
the probability of the new text associated to each topics. In this way the project could become a
modern tool to continue in the action of preservation and enhancement of the Venetian cultural
heritage, initiated by Gradenigo.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to dr. Monica Viero and the staff of Museo Correr Library in Venice.
References
[1] B. Over, Notizie settecentesche sulla musica a San Marco: i Notatori di Pietro Gradenigo, in
La cappella musicale di San Marco nell’età moderna Gradenigo-Dolfin, Palazzo Giustinian
Lolin, Venezia, 1998.
[2] P. Zecchin, I deseri di cristallo a venezia nel settecento, Journal of glass studies 46 (2004)
159–171.
[3] F. Stopper, Gli specchi veneziani, “verieri” e “specchieri” dal cinquecento all’ottocento,
Studi veneziani LXXVII (2018) 321–380.
[4] F. Stopper, Per la storia degli orefici veneziani del settecento: le fonti letterarie, Atti
dell’Istituto Veneto di scienze, lettere ed arti CLXXVI (2018) 101–136.
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[6] P. Gradenigo, L. Livan, Notizie d’arte tratte dai Notatori e dagli Annali del N. H. Pietro
Gradenigo, Venezia, 1942.
[7] C. Bombardini, Per un’edizione ragionata dei Notatori di Pietro Gradenigo, Ph.D. thesis,
History, Criticism and Conservation of Cultural Heritage, Padua, 2020. Supervisor: Prof.
Andrea Tomezzoli.
[8] G. Moschini, Vite di tre personaggi illustri della famiglia Gradenigo benemeriti della let-
teratura nel secolo XVIII pubblicate nelle faustissime nozze Gradenigo-Dolfin, Venezia,
1809.