Strada – Magnum ac Novum Opus

Jacopo Strada’s Magnum ac Novum Opus survives in two halves held in different places: the coin drawings as illustrated volumes at the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, the matching descriptions as Diaskeué volumes at Würzburg University Library. Finding the text for a given drawing means moving between two collections.

The task

Make both strands of transmission available as a TEI edition — and answer the question of which description belongs to which drawing.

The approach

The transcripts are TEI XML and are rendered directly in the browser by TEI Boilerplate; no build step, no server logic. A Python pipeline extracts the references from the volumes, validates them, and writes the verified links back into the documents. Two views make the result usable: a dashboard showing the state of work per volume, and a side-by-side display pairing each drawing with its description.

The outcome

From 8,212 reference rows across 29 volumes came 1,566 verified links. Progress is visible per volume and the pipeline can be re-run at any time — and because the concordance views are plain HTML, they remain unaffected by how much longer browsers will support XSLT rendering.