“Tea for two”. The Archive of the Italian Latinity of the Middle Ages meets the CLARIN infrastructure

This paper aims at showing how integrating the Archive of the Italian Latinity of the Middle Ages (ALIM) into the ILC4CLARIN repository can provide mutual benefits. Making ALIM available to a large community of scholars and researchers, on the one side, represents the first step to reduce the lack of resources for Medieval Latin in CLARIN and, on the other side, constitutes an unprecedented contribution to not only linguistic investigations, but also to the studies of the culture and science at the basis of the Western European society. The paper describes the adopted approach aiming to keep intact the structure of the archive and its metadata, which are both accurately mirrored into the ILC4CLARIN repository in order to maintain existing access practices of the users. This structure can be found in exactly the same state within the CLARIN VLO. Finally, the paper illustrates the advantages of experimenting with some ALIM data, once introduced within the CLARIN Language Resource Switchboard service: first results are shown from the analysis of some texts with the UDPipe tool suite and the distant reading tool Voyant.