The CorrSiCa Project: enhancing and “querying” the Canioni family correspondence

The CorrCa project, undertaken by professors and PhD students from the University of Genoa's PhD program in Digital Humanities, involves the digitization and the enhancement of a family correspondence comprising approx. 300 letters. This correspondence belongs to the Canioni family, originally from Olmi-Cappella, an inland village in the northern part of Corsica. The letters span the years 1882-1918, featuring contributions from both male and female writers with varying levels of literacy in the two languages of correspondence, namely Italian and French. This paper outlines the ongoing development of (i) a blog designed to enrich the document corpus, engaging not only general users but also secondary school students, and (ii) an ontology for the future querying of this archival material. The ontology aims to extract valuable references and explore the correlations between language, gender, and the authors' origins. The objective is to delve into archival, philological, and sociolinguistic aspects related to the reference population.