Modelling Early Modern Reasoning for the Venetian Risposte: a Scalable Framework

The documentary series Risposte (replies), preserved in the Archivio di Stato di Venezia, forms an almost continuous collection of advisory opinions drafted by the Cinque Savi alla Mercanzia for the Venetian Senate (1540-1733). The paper presents a pilot study that treats the Risposte as structured units of policy reasoning that can be modelled and analysed at scale. Focusing on register 142 (1607-1610), for which a complete digitisation and a subset of manual diplomatic transcriptions are ­ available, we define the single Risposta as the primary decision unit and design a two-layer data model: a minimal documentary core plus an analytical layer with controlled vocabularies (policy domain, decision orientation, triggers, actors, ­ geography). Institutional variants are encoded as explicit relations rather than treated as exceptions. To support scalability, we report a first evaluation of an automated text recognition (ATR) workflow bridging Transkribus and eScriptorium through the XML-PAGE interchange format, and we prototype lightweight rule-based procedures (deontic formula extraction, monetary expressions, similarity measures) for semi-automatic population and quality control. The pilot operationalizes two directions of scalability: a stable decision-unit model and an interoperable transcription pipeline to populate it, enabling future large-scale analysis of institutional coherence, policy drift, and trade oversight in early modern Venice.