Scanning is Just the Beginning: Exploiting Text and Language Technologies to Enhance the Value of Historical Manuscripts

In this paper we present a digital process for the explicitation of the textual, linguistic and semantic content of historical manuscripts. The proposed workflow is composed of a sequence of incremental steps, each of which is described both on a methodological and practical perspective. The steps are: 1) visualization and structuring of metadata, 2) transcription, 3) structural encoding, 4) annotation, 5) lexical and conceptual structuring.