Digitizing and Encoding a Multilingual Literary Review: Commerce Numerique

Abstract—Commerce was an important literary review founded in Paris by Princess Margherita Caetani, Prince Roffredo Caetani’s wife. Born in America, she was polyglot and maecenas. Between 1924 and 1932 she surrounded herself with three prestigious collaborators: Paul Valéry, Léon-Paul Fargue, Valéry Larbaud. The review promoted the translation of World andEuropean literature in French, translating some of the most important authors like Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Pirandello, Ungaretti, Saint-John Perse, Rilke, Hofmannsthal. The aim of this project is to promote by digitizing the dissemination of the review, to develop studies and research concerning the Caetani family’s cultural activities in Europe. All the volumes of the literary review Commerce have been scanned, acquired by OCR and encoded in TEI-XML. The cultural value of the operation is discussed and the work-flow to create the digital textual corpus is described in detail. Index Terms—Review Commerce, OCR, TEI encoding, literary review, digital resources.