Navigating The World of Dante

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Major Sections of The World of Dante: On the Home Page of The World of Dante you will find seven buttons. The first, Overview of the World of Dante, explains the editing criteria employed to mark up the Inferno. When you click on the second bullet, Browse the Text of the Inferno, it takes you to the TEI-tagged Italian text of the poem, presented through Dynaweb (an SGML-aware Web server). There are three screens: left, right, and bottom. Clicking on any canto number on the left screen will take you to the Italian text of that canto, which will appear on the right screen. The third bullet, "Search the text of Dante's Inferno," will take you to the structured search page (see below). The fourth link is to "Navigate a 3D View of Dante's Inferno (explained below), the fifth links to a schematic map of Hell by Lindsay McCulloch, the sixth to this help document, and the seventh ("Credits") links to a page with information about the people who have contributed to this project.

Illustrations: As you scroll through the text of any canto in the right screen you will see arrows to the right of the text and many blue asterisks next to particular words.

The arrows indicate that there is illustrative material to accompany a particular line. If you click on one of these arrows, the number of illustrations that have been compiled for each line will appear in the bottom screen as hyperlinks. For example, if you click on the arrow to the right of Inf.1.33, you will see "Illustration 1" in the bottom screen.

Clicking on "Illustration 1" will bring up the image for this line number in a new browser window. It is possible that this new browser window will obscure the first browser window (with the text of the poem in it), so you may want to arrange the two on your desktop. Once the image browser window is open, all subsequent illustrations will go to that window, so if you're looking at a number of illustrations, it will save time to keep the image browser window open, but if you want to get rid of it, you can just click on the X at the top right-hand corner of the image browser window.

Other Textual Apparatus: If you hold the mouse over any of the asterisks in the text, a text-box will pop up containing the information that has been encoded in the SGML markup concerning that word or phrase.

For example, the asterisk at the end of Inf.1.63, "chi per lungo silenzio parea fioco," a circumlocution for Virgil, will reveal information concerning Virgil, including his nature, originplace, dates, and the regularized form of his name. To find out more about the kinds of information that can be found concerning persons, places, structures, deities, creatures, and all allusions to traveling, click on any of the asterisks.

Standard Dynaweb Navigational Features: The left and right blue arrows which appear above or below the text of each canto allow you to go forwards or backwards by canto. The bottom screen contains four sets of binoculars.

The leftmost binoculars will take you to a structured search of the Inferno (see below for more information on structured searching), the second and third set of binoculars allow users to go back and forth in a list of search results, the rightmost binoculars icon clears the search. The fifth icon--a subdivided rectangle with a red slash through it--turns off frames in the display of the text of the Inferno.

How to Search Dante's Inferno

Searches of the text must be performed in Italian. Users unfamiliar with Italian spelling for names, places, creatures etc, should consult the Authority List for Searching Dante's Inferno, which lists normalized forms of names for persons, places, creatures, and deities. In this document, the left column indicates common English spelling of these entities, the right column indicates spelling users must employ to perform searches on these entities.

Keep in mind that searches will produce occurences of the word as typed, unless you use a wildcard character (the asterisk). For example, a search for the word "amore" will only yield places in the text in which that word is spelled in this way, not variant spellings such as "amor"; a search for "amor" will not find "amore"; but a search for "amor*" will find both, as well as "amorosa".

The World of Dante allows users to search Dante's text and the editorial markup in any of three ways:

Simple keyword search: type the keyword (in Italian) in the long rectangular box at the bottom of the standard Dynaweb screen and then click the search button to the right of that text-entry box. Search results will return in the regular, three-part Dynaweb screen. Remember you can use the middle two binocular icons to navigate among search results.

 
Structured search: click on the leftmost binoculars icon (or the "Search Dante's Inferno" link on the Home Page), and you will get the form for structured searches. Using this form, you can do one of two major types of structured searches: you can search Dante's text or search references. Searching Text means you are looking for Dante's words; searching references means you are searching the editorial markup of Dante's text.



 

Structured Text Search: In the structured text search, keyword search terms can be limited to a particular context (Person, Place, Diety, Structure, Creature). For example, if users wish to search the text for the varieties of expressions Dante employs to designate entities such as Virgil (Virgilio), type "Virgilio" in the "Search Text" window, then click on the circle next to "person," then click on the "Search Text" button. A search for Virgilio will yield 49 results. The left screen indicates the distribution of the allusions to Virgil by canto. The right screen indicates where precisely in the canto these allusions appear. Simply click on the canto number whose allusions you wish to study and scroll through the canto. Red arrows will appear to the left of the text indicating passages in which Dante alludes to Virgil with a wide range of circumlocutions and epithets. The criteria for the editorial decisions involved in the markup that supports this type of search are explained in the general Overview of the World of Dante. To get a feel for information such searches can yield, try searches on words such as Dio, Virgilio, Firenze, Piero della Vigna, Cocito, Beatrice. Users will quickly see the wide variety of expressions Dante employs to designate persons, places, creatures, etc. To keep track of the nature of the search simply check the bottom screen and the information in the SGML tagging scheme will appear in long horizontal box.

 

 
 

Structured Reference Search: Users can also search references by type. One can search for all people, for example, whose nature is historical, who were affiliated with the Ghibelline party, and whose origin place is Firenze (Florence). To perform such a search simply click on the category (ie People) and type in a search term (ie Firenze; Ghibelline) in the appropriate text-entry box (if any), and then click on the "Search References" button. Searches for creatures, deities, references to traveling, places, and structures can be performed in the same way. Simply click on the appropriate circles and then "search references" to find results.


Users familiar with TEI markup can perform more sophisticated and specialized searches. For example, if you wish to search the references to rivers in the Inferno, type in the name of a river, ie "Arno" under "Search Text" and then click on place, a search which produces 5 hits. In the horizontal box in the bottom screen, one can substitute the REG tag with "type"=river, a search which would then produce 60 results, 60 passages in the Inferno that have been tagged as rivers.
 

Text Visualization: The third way in which users can search Dante's Inferno, as part of the World of Dante, is through a text visualization, a link to which can be found on the project's Home Page, labeled "Navigate a 3D View of Dante's Inferno". When you follow that link, you are presented with a two-part frame, the upper part of which is reserved for the VRML model that will be produced in response to the search criteria you select in the bottom part. The available criteria are all the same things you would find under the structured reference search: people, deities, creatures, places, structures, travel. You can choose among three colors to be used in flagging the location of the type or types of reference you're interested in. If you prefer, you can simply use the checkboxes to the left in the lower frame, and the entire category will be flagged in grey.

 

 

Once you've selected the search criteria, hit the "generate" button, and you will get back a VRML model of the Inferno, with each canto represented by one circle in a cone-shaped model, and each line by one point on a circle. Flags of various colors will be distributed across the text-model, showing the clustering and distribution of various types of reference. NB: the flags themselves are links back to the Dynaweb text of the Inferno; clicking on a flag will take you to the exact line in the text represented by that flag. Or, if you prefer, just position the mouse-pointer over the flag that's of interest, and in the bottom of the browser window you will see a text string that identifies the canto number, line number, and basic information about that reference.