XX Century Italian Handwriting 1.0

The model was developed as part of a project by the library of Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan to improve accessibility to the documents contained in the archives of its Special Collections. The model includes documents extracted from archival fonds by five different 20th-century personalities: Aristide Calderini (archaeologist and epigrapher), Roberto Busa (linguist and computer scientist), Giampiero Neri, Pasquale Maffeo, and Sandro Sinigaglia (poets and writers). These five handwritings, which are chronologically consistent, exhibit significant variability in terms of graphic style: regular, structured and looped (Neri, Calderini), large and italic (Busa, Maffeo), small in size with frequent variations in shape (Sinigaglia). From the perspective of languages and vocabulary, Italian predominates with a a formal to high register, supplemented with Latin (from classical and ecclesiastical sources) and occasional insertions of specialized terms in English, German, and French. The project includes periodic updates of the model to incorporate writings from other 20th-century archives held at the university. Trained by Matteo Ruggeri with contributions from Lorenzo Babini (UCSC-Milan-Library).