Recovering Legacy in the Digital World: Tales and Tools

Given the well-known issues arising from the short lifespan of many legacy digital resources, this paper describes with real-world usage cases a generic-purpose, modular, and reusable framework for recovering digital formats or even paper-based resources. Ranging from legacy and/or proprietary formats and even character-encodings (including well-known legacy technologies like Beta code or SAMPA), raw digitized editions and textual corpora, critical editions, dictionaries, and other highly structured texts, up to totally different resources like documental archives, the same framework provides different flows all targeted to recovery, in the most pregnant of its meanings. Often, the recovery is not only the mere act of swapping a serialization technology with another; rather, it implies a less or more involved remodeling of legacy data targeted to a paper-based world, by transforming a typographically-oriented structure into a semantic one. This cannot be done without significant efforts, but such systems can alleviate the task, and even further enlighten the features of truly digital resources in digital humanities. The critical edition of Priscian’s book xviii offers a use case for illustrating this point.