SAPIENZA - Dipartimento di Scienze Giuridiche

Duration of the project: 24 months (30/11/2023-30/11/2025)

 

Main ERC field: SH - Social Sciences and Humanities

ERC subfields: SH2_4 Legal studies, constitutions, human rights, comparative law - SH4_9 Theoretical linguistics; computational linguistics - SH6_6 Ancient history

 

Principal Investigator: PEDONE Michele - Ricercatore a t.d. - t.pieno (art. 24 c.3-b L. 240/10) - Università di PISA

 

Substitute Principal Investigator: ANGELOSANTO Antonio - Ricercatore a t.d. - t.pieno (art. 24 c.3-b L. 240/10) - Università degli Studi di ROMA "La Sapienza"

 

(Resp.) ANGELOSANTO Antonio - Ricercatore a t.d. - t.pieno (art. 24 c.3-b L. 240/10)

DURSI Domenico - Professore Ordinario (L. 240/10)

PESCATORE Valerio - Professore Ordinario (L. 240/10)

SACCOCCIO Antonio - Professore Ordinario (L. 240/10)

TASSI Elena - Professore Ordinario (L. 240/10)

 

Brief description of the proposal: aims at transforming a milestone of the European cultural heritage, Justinian's Digest, into a shared resource, accessible to users all over the world, inter-operable with analogue resources and encoded according to international standards. The Digest is the thesaurus of the ancient Roman legal science. It collects texts excerpted from over 200 works by almost 40 different Roman jurists, plus references to otherwise unknown works of further jurists and legal enactments. After having been 're-discovered' in Italy in the 11th century, the Digest has been spread throughout Europe by Medieval jurists, thus becoming the core of the common foundations of the modern and contemporary civil law systems all over the world. Despite its great importance both in terms of legal history and of cultural heritage, the Digest is poorly accessible for the Italian-speaking public, lawyers included. The main barrier to its fruition is linguistic: the technical complexity of the Latin and Greek legal language makes the Digest a heirloom that is de facto exclusive property of very few hyper-specialists. The most recent Italian translation of the Digest, directed by Sandro Schipani, is modern and more accessible, but it has not reached all its original targets: only books 1–36 have been translated. Furthermore, having been made by dozens of different translators over three decades, problems of inner coherence on both the legal and linguistic side have arisen. Also the digital side of Schipani’s project needs updating, to ensure better accessibility and avoid premature obsolescence. The main goal is to tackle this situation with a twofold approach and an international perspective. The project intends to create a complete and updated Italian translation of the text of the Digest. This target will be attained not only through traditional academical expertise in the field of Roman law, but also through an innovative approach based on computational linguistics. The aims is disseminating of the output to ensure better value and open accessibility to the cultural heritage of Roman law. First, the original text and the Italian translation will be digitized and made available for browsing and parallel reading in an open access publication. Second, a searchable digital glossary of the Roman legal terminology will be published. Third, both the operational tools and the scientific contents will be exported in XML-TEI format on the international open access infrastructure to ensure interoperability and long-term preservation of the data. Fourth, operative strategies based on the aforementioned principles of shareability and inter-operability will be implemented. The combination of these lines of action will make this a seminal project, deploying the traditional academic methodical knowledge and the most advanced technologies of computational linguistics to ensure, on solid scientific grounds, user-friendly access to the Digest for the 21st century public.