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Building a digital edition of The Lusiads

Original (Portuguese): A elaboração de uma edição digital d'Os Lusíadas

Paper · 2026 · Bruno Maroneze, Vanessa Martins do Monte, André Bertacchi et al.

Summary

The Lusíadas Digital project addresses the absence of a systematic, interactive virtual philological edition of Camões's Os Lusíadas. A central difficulty is that two editions are both dated 1572. They are distinguished by the direction the pelican faces on the title page (sinistrógira vs. dextrógira) and differ in spelling, punctuation, wording, typos and layout.

The authors describe a modular platform with these components:

  • facsimile images synchronized with transcriptions;
  • diplomatic and modernized texts in European and Brazilian spelling;
  • a dynamic critical apparatus that highlights and filters variants;
  • a hyperlinked glossary;
  • aligned historical translations.

The workflow has four steps: curating public-domain sources, OCR in Transkribus followed by manual correction, TEI-XML encoding, and NLP. The planned NLP work covers lemmatization and POS tagging adapted to 16th-century spelling and poetic syntax, automatic variant detection, and alignment with translations.

Canto I has been fully transcribed. A simple verse-level comparison already shows extensive divergence between the two editions. The pilot is meant to become a reusable, interoperable model for the remaining cantos and other early printed texts, which would strengthen e-Philology in Brazil.

Key points

  • Canto I serves as the pilot. Its OCR-based transcription in Transkribus, with manual revision, is complete. A Transkribus model for 16th-century Portuguese typography will be released as a by-product.
  • A basic Python verse-by-verse comparison of the two 1572 editions of Canto I flagged 238 divergent lines out of 848. Because single lines can contain several differences, the authors plan word-level alignment that also accounts for punctuation and missing words.
  • The TEI-XML encoding, done in Oxygen XML, marks:
    • verses (<l>) and stanzas (<lg>);
    • variants (<app>, <rdg>);
    • notes (<note>);
    • proper names (<name>).
  • Glossary entries will first link to the dictionary of Peixoto and Pinto (1924). The Silva Dias critical edition (1916) is cited as the main printed reference.
  • Aligned translations will include Spanish (Garces, 1591), Latin (Faria, 1622), Italian (Paggi, 1658) and English (Mickle, 1776). Standard tools such as spaCy need adaptation to historical spelling variants, for example Africa/Affrica.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 works

Cite

Cite as Bruno Maroneze, Vanessa Martins do Monte, André Bertacchi, Artur Costrino, Alexandre Agnolon and Mário Eduardo Viaro. 2026. A elaboração de uma edição digital d'Os Lusíadas. Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2026) - Vol. 2.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{maroneze2026elaboracao,
  title = {{A elaboração de uma edição digital d'Os Lusíadas}},
  author = {Bruno Maroneze, Vanessa Martins do Monte, André Bertacchi, Artur Costrino, Alexandre Agnolon and Mário Eduardo Viaro},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2026) - Vol. 2},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2026.propor-2.39/}
}

References

6 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Luís Vaz de Camões. 1916. Os Lusíadas. Companhia Portugueza Editora, Porto. Comentados por Augusto Epiphanio da Silva Dias. 2. ed. melhorada. Tomo I. find
  2. Gregory Crane, David Bamman, and Alison Jones. 2008. ephilology: When the books talk to their readers. In Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman, editors, A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Blackwell, Oxford. find
  3. Tomás de Faria. 1622. Lusiadum Libri Decem. Ex Officina Gerardi de Vinca, Lisboa. \#\#\# 7.1 Pesquisa filológica Apesar de o texto camoniano já ter sido largamente estudado, a abordagem computacional pode trazer um olhar novo à obra (ainda que não necessariamente superior). Além disso, os métodos desen… find
  4. Carlo Antonio Paggi. 1658. Lusiada Italiana. Poema Heroico del grande Luigi de Camões. por Henrique Valente de Oliveira, Lisboa. find
  5. Afrânio Peixoto and Pedro A. Pinto. 1924. Dicionario d’Os Lusíadas de Luis de Camões. Francisco Alves, Rio de Janeiro. find
  6. TEI Consortium. 2025. TEI: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. Accessed: 18 Feb. 2026. find

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