Aracne2. A modular platform for the editing and publication of TEI corpora

Publisher: FedOA - Federico II University Press 

Series: Historical Knowledges and New Technologies

Pages: 56

Language:  Italian

Abstract: Aracne2 is a modular CMS for editing and publishing scholarly corpora encoded in TEI. Designed for philologists, historians, archivists, and digital editors, it enables typewritten transcriptions to be transformed into citable, searchable, and machine-actionable digital editions, without requiring advanced system-administration skills. The project stems from a long-standing experience in tools for digital editing: from MaRa, developed from 2008 onwards for the automatic markup of the Registers of the Angevin Chancery, to Aracne, a platform based on eXist-db and XQuery, used between 2016 and 2024 for several scholarly editions. Aracne2 retains eXist-db as the native archive for TEI documents, while entrusting authentication, workflows, plugins, and integrations to a Python/FastAPI/PostgreSQL backend, with a Vue 3 interface. The platform stands out for its clear separation between the state of the corpus and the state of the system, its extensible plugin architecture, and the integration of AI-assisted tools. Different providers — OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and local Ollama — can be configured within a customizable prompt library, with retrieval-augmented generation functions anchored in the TEI P5 Guidelines and in the user's own corpus. The volume presents the editorial and technical model of Aracne2, reconstructs its genesis, and reflects on the use of artificial intelligence as an integrated editorial tool, rather than as a merely conversational add-on.