This guide is written against the current public workbench as it now exists locally. It assumes that you are already interested in Dante and the commentary tradition, and that what you need is not a software manual but a readable map of how this page now wants to be used.
Entering The Workbench
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 the workbench 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.
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 source archive, 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 the workbench, 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.
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 still the central reading spine of the current workbench.
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 steadier 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?
Compare
Compare is where several commentary cards can be held in view at the same time. It turns the burden of memory into visible 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.
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 current build uses exact-form recurrence first, with a cautious family-level pilot for a smaller set of words.
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.
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 the current local workbench, this panel follows a text-first Cross-Canto Echoes baseline. It reads Dante's line first, then nearby terzina context, and only then uses commentary as a lighter support layer. The panel now tries to show the strongest visible echoes for the current line immediately: reviewable echoes first when they exist, and thinner but still readable echoes when they do not.
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
The workbench does not stop at line, card, and local vocabulary. It also lets you follow figures, commentators, authors, works, nodes, and commentary sources. That is what the Authority route is for.
Figure Navigation
Figure Navigation follows figures that belong to the poem itself. It stays close to character presence and line occurrence rather than shifting immediately into citation structures.
Authority Lens
Authority Lens follows authors, commentators, works, nodes, and commentary sources. It lets the commentary tradition appear as a history of authority use, inherited citation, and source selection, not only as a pile of isolated notes.
Authority Page
The standalone Authority page gives this route a quieter reading surface of its own. Use it when you want to stay with authors, works trees, personaggi, and source reading without the full pressure of the workbench around it.
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
The current workbench does not try to hide that some layers are stronger than others. The authority line is now fully mounted, 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 the workbench.