The Semantic Digital Edition of Aldo Moro’s Writings: A Workflow supporting Data Sharing and Replicability

Digital editions have been long recognized as significant scholarly outputs, reflecting a tradition dating back to computational philology and evolving to encompass comprehensive literary and scientific knowledge management on the web. However, debates still persist around how to use data models, technical tools and interface design to implement and document such resources so as to make them as replicable and usable as possible. Given these premises, this paper focuses on presenting a semantic digital edition workflow, and, specifically, examines three crucial aspects: the integration of Semantic Web technologies for enriching textual representation; the development of a web-based markup tool that enables domain experts to produce crowdsourced markup; and the production of comprehensive technical documentation to ensure replicability. To do so, the paper details how the workflow was applied to create a digital edition of Aldo Moro’s works within a project funded by the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and for Tourism. The paper outlines the workflow stages, including survey and transcription, data modeling, markup and metadata insertion, web design, and documentation, underscoring the importance of formalized methods in developing digital scholarly editions. By adhering to established editorial and technological standards, the edition offers a nuanced exploration of Moro’s writings, leveraging semantic technologies to provide a platform for scholarly engagement and exploration on the web.