This guide maps the Segni de l’antica fiamma reading desk: how to enter through a canto or line, open commentary, follow word and line routes, compare cards, and read authority paths. It describes not only where each panel is, but what sort of scholarly move each panel is designed to support.
It is also written for two readers at once. A philologist will usually want to know how a surface stays tied to wording, span, and recoverable textual evidence. A digital humanist will usually want to know what local transform is actually being run there, and what kind of algorithmic modesty or boundary still applies.
Entering Segni de l’antica fiamma
The top shell is the page’s true entrance. It gives you four things before anything else: the title block, the quick jump and search box, the canto map, and the current canto’s line-level entry surface. Read them in that order and the rest of the page will make more sense.
This matters because Segni de l’antica fiamma is not arranged as a dashboard of unrelated widgets. It is a reading desk. The opening shell is there to return you to canto, line, and poem as quickly as possible.
If you read the page in that order, later layers remain interpretable. Entry still feels like Dante, Close Reading still feels like commentary, and the more computational layers remain visibly secondary rather than claiming to replace the poem.
Title Block, Guide, and About
The title block tells you where you are. Guide explains how to move through the interface. About explains the project, the local corpus, the commentary source, and the public data statement. They are separate on purpose.
Quick Jump / Search
This box merges structured navigation and lexical search. Coordinates can take you to canto or line; words use the local search index and return you to a readable place in Segni de l’antica fiamma, not to a detached results page.
Canto Browser
The browser restores the whole Commedia as a navigable map. It lets you orient yourself before you begin reading any single note, and it keeps the current canto legible inside Inferno, Purgatorio, or Paradiso as a whole.
Main Entry
The current canto’s main entry is the line-level surface of the poem. Commentary density is already visible here, but you are still on the poem itself. Clicking a line and clicking a Dante content word are two different gestures, and the page keeps them separate.
That separation is methodological as much as visual. Choosing a line means you want the tradition that reaches that line. Choosing a word means you want a narrower lexical route. The interface keeps those acts apart so that line-reading and word-reading do not collapse into each other too early.
Following The Main Reading Spine
Once one line is chosen, the page opens in sequence. First comes a quick contour. Then come the commentary cards themselves. Then the line opens into more stable local interpretive groupings. This is the central reading spine of Segni de l’antica fiamma.
The sequence matters because it preserves inspectability. You first see how much commentary is there, then which records are involved, and only after that which local interpretive patterns seem to recur. In other words, the page delays abstraction until after contact with the records themselves.
Analysis Layer / Line Snapshot
This layer gives a light contour of the selected line: coverage, granularity, top commentary terms, diachronic span, and century distribution. It helps you feel how dense, how spread out, and how historically layered the commentary attention is before you sink into the cards.
Close Reading
This is where the cards actually open. Sorting, line span, dates, full-text expansion, and side-by-side comparison matter here because the commentary is finally on the table as readable material rather than as a signal.
Interpretive Fields
This layer gathers the records touching the selected line into local explanatory directions. It answers a scholar-facing question: what kinds of explanation keep recurring around this line, and which path back into the cards is thematically most promising?
These fields should be read as commentary-side handles, not as final names for Dante’s meaning. Their value lies in helping you re-enter the cards through a more stable local cluster rather than forcing you to read a raw stack with no thematic foothold.
Compare
Compare is where several commentary cards can be held in view at the same time. It turns the burden of memory into a comparison space. Many Dante readings become clearer only when different explanatory traditions are literally laid beside one another.
Following One Dante Word
The Dante Word Locus Layer begins from one selected content word in the poem. It works on a smaller scale than the line-level panels and follows one word outward into recurrence, local concurrence, phrase growth, and contrastive interpretive language.
It is intentionally modest in scope. The point is not to claim a full morphology engine or a final lexical ontology, but to let one word open a controlled path whose evidence can still be checked against exact occurrences, local contexts, and commentary uptake.
Dante Word Locus Layer
This is the local shell that opens once one Dante content word has been selected. It stays close to the word itself and only then starts widening outward.
Occurrence Explorer
If your first question is where this word comes back elsewhere in the poem, start here. The route uses exact-form recurrence first, with a cautious family-level pilot for a smaller set of words.
That order is deliberate. Exact return keeps the route tied to Dante’s wording, while family-level recurrence is treated as a carefully limited widening rather than a replacement for what the text explicitly says.
Weighted Micro-Context Concurrence
If your question is which nearby content words repeatedly gather around the current locus, this panel gives the local co-occurrence window. It is local, not a detached topic model.
The scale stays small on purpose. This is meant to help you feel the verbal weather immediately around the chosen word, not to turn the canto into a floating semantic cloud.
Exact Local Phrase Expansions
If the word begins to grow into a short recurring phrase, this layer raises the scale slightly and shows which local verbal groupings stabilise enough to recur elsewhere in the poem.
Contrastive Interpretive Vocabulary
When you want to return from the poem to the language of the commentators, this panel asks which interpretive terms do real work around the selected locus rather than simply listing the most frequent words.
Cross-Canto Echoes
In Segni de l’antica fiamma, Cross-Canto Echoes is a text-first reading layer. It starts from the current Dante line, widens to nearby terzina context, and keeps commentary as a lighter support layer. The panel shows reviewable echoes first when they exist, and thinner but still readable echoes when they do not.
That makes the panel useful for both close reading and hypothesis testing. It can suggest a parallel worth pursuing, but it still asks the echoed line to earn its place through wording and local poetic context before commentary support is allowed to reinforce the relation.
Direction labels now tell you whether the current line looks back on an earlier line or looks forward to a later one. When axis language appears, it now works only as an explanatory note for a relation already surfaced by the text-first baseline; it no longer defines the ranking.
Reading Through Authority
Segni de l’antica fiamma does not stop at line, card, and local vocabulary. Authority now begins from the selected line, shows the authors and works detected in commentary records reaching that line, and then widens through Line, Canto Map, and Full Authority Page.
This matters because commentary is also a history of citation, inheritance, and intellectual affiliation. Authority is useful only when it keeps its route back to the local record, the visible wording, and the scope at which the claim is being made.
Line Scope
Start with the line card. Authority names and work chips are summaries of commentary records touching the selected line. Clicking a work chip opens the filtered record list behind that count; clicking Open in reader opens one preserved commentary record.
Canto Map
Canto Map widens the same question to the whole canto. Use it when you want to see where an authority gathers, which lines carry the strongest local signal, and whether a route is concentrated or dispersed.
Full Authority Page
Full Authority Page is the wider room for an author or personaggio. It stages text hits, commentary witnesses, work layers, and static rooms where those objects are mounted, while keeping special-case or commentary-sensitive routes visible as such.
Moving Around The Page
The shell is deliberately simple. The fixed anchors on the right return you to the major reading zones: Entry, Close Reading, Compare, and Authority. Top sends you upward. Back returns you to the previous reading position. Full-text cards expand in place rather than opening a separate viewer.
The language switch affects the shell and the public guide pages. It does not pretend that every layer of scholarship has already been translated into one fully unified voice.
Honest Boundaries
Segni de l’antica fiamma does not try to hide that some layers are stronger than others. The authority line is now fully available, but some rooms are still thicker than others. This is why the page still uses layered entry language, direct room labels, and honest notes about depth rather than pretending every object has the same interior weight.
This guide therefore does a practical job. It is not the project’s public statement. Its purpose is to make the next readable move clearer once you are already inside Segni de l’antica fiamma.
That honesty is part of the design rather than a temporary embarrassment. Segni de l’antica fiamma is strongest when it tells you which surfaces are already thick, which are exploratory, and which still rely on a more careful reading contract.