The project I have the pleasure to present today was supported under the Sapienza Awards Scheme 2015 Exercise. The short title of the project being Totus Mundus Project ( certainly Totus Mundus stands for the famous Nadal’s statement that for a Jesuit missio-nary :“Totus mundus nostra fit habitatio”, The World is our home. Since we do not have much time and yet we want you to catch a glimple of what we have been doing these years, I will only very briefly tell you how it all began and then I shall hand over to my colleagues, the information science engineers from CNR. While working on the inventory of Pasquale D’Elia’s papers, held at the APUG, we came across the working papers of the translation of Matteo Ricci’s World Atlas Kunyu wanguo quantu, that D’Elia had published in the ’50. The translation had taken the form of a huge, lavishly illustrated and outrageously expensive in folio book. The size of this printed item was such that it actually prevented it from being read and researched as it deserved. Not quite suitable as bed time reading, nor to be taken into your briefcase or even on your desk, the book did not have the wide distribution that other works by D’Elia, think of the Fonti Ricciane or Galileo in China, had had. It was Martin Morales, Director of APUG, idea that we should do something to recover the value of this less known work by D’Elia. Should we reprint the book?, or perhaps digitali-ze it? Indeed, we did not want to simply scan the text. We wanted to enhance D’Elia’s work and, at the same time, bring back to light the multiple layers of meanings of the ori-ginal wording of the Kunyu Wanguo Quantu. In one word, we needed computational lin-guistics. After all, the father of computational linguistics was himself a Jesuit father: Ro-berto Busa. Both Ricci and D’Elia might have felt in good company with him. I will then give the floor to my colleagues Andrea Marchetti and Silvia Piccini, who will explain the technicalities, but, before I do so, allow me to introduce the members of our team:
TOTUS MUNDUS PROJECT: a virtual journey through Pasquale D'Elia's edition of Kunyu quantu by Matteo Ricci, SJ (1602) / Corsi, Elisabetta; Marchetti, Andrea; Piccini, Silvia. - ELETTRONICO. - (2018), pp. 14-14. (Intervento presentato al convegno 10th International Conference of Missionary Linguistics "Asia" tenutosi a Roma).
TOTUS MUNDUS PROJECT: a virtual journey through Pasquale D'Elia's edition of Kunyu quantu by Matteo Ricci, SJ (1602)
Elisabetta Corsi
;
2018
Abstract
The project I have the pleasure to present today was supported under the Sapienza Awards Scheme 2015 Exercise. The short title of the project being Totus Mundus Project ( certainly Totus Mundus stands for the famous Nadal’s statement that for a Jesuit missio-nary :“Totus mundus nostra fit habitatio”, The World is our home. Since we do not have much time and yet we want you to catch a glimple of what we have been doing these years, I will only very briefly tell you how it all began and then I shall hand over to my colleagues, the information science engineers from CNR. While working on the inventory of Pasquale D’Elia’s papers, held at the APUG, we came across the working papers of the translation of Matteo Ricci’s World Atlas Kunyu wanguo quantu, that D’Elia had published in the ’50. The translation had taken the form of a huge, lavishly illustrated and outrageously expensive in folio book. The size of this printed item was such that it actually prevented it from being read and researched as it deserved. Not quite suitable as bed time reading, nor to be taken into your briefcase or even on your desk, the book did not have the wide distribution that other works by D’Elia, think of the Fonti Ricciane or Galileo in China, had had. It was Martin Morales, Director of APUG, idea that we should do something to recover the value of this less known work by D’Elia. Should we reprint the book?, or perhaps digitali-ze it? Indeed, we did not want to simply scan the text. We wanted to enhance D’Elia’s work and, at the same time, bring back to light the multiple layers of meanings of the ori-ginal wording of the Kunyu Wanguo Quantu. In one word, we needed computational lin-guistics. After all, the father of computational linguistics was himself a Jesuit father: Ro-berto Busa. Both Ricci and D’Elia might have felt in good company with him. I will then give the floor to my colleagues Andrea Marchetti and Silvia Piccini, who will explain the technicalities, but, before I do so, allow me to introduce the members of our team:I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
