From Notes to Nodes: Interactive Modeling and Visualization of Bertini's Dictionary of Musicians (1814)

The lightning talk presents a methodological framework developed to transform Girolamo Bertini’s Dizionario storico-critico degli scrittori di musica e de’ più celebri artisti (1814) into an interactive network-based visualization system for exploratory and distant reading. The four-volume biographical dictionary is partly based on the French Dictionnaire historique des musiciens (1810-1811), but Bertini expands the model by adding a large number of entries devoted to Italian composers and musicians. While Bertini’s work represents an important resource for musical historiography, the linear structure of the text makes it difficult to perceive broader relational patterns among the entries, such as shared geographical or professional connections. Following the perspective of distant reading introduced by Moretti (2000; 2013), the aim of this study is to reframe sequences of isolated narrative units as part of larger relational structures.