Reconstructing Operatic Mobility and Exchanges Across the Adriatic: Issues and Challenges of a Methodological Approach Grounded in Prosopography and Network Analysis

Several scholars have so far addressed themes related to operatic mobility and exchanges across the shores of the Adriatic, offering valuable, yet necessarily partial, reconstructions. The research conducted to date underscores implicitly the urgency of creating a shared, global, and interactive digital resource centered on Adriatic networks (and, on a broader scale, we might say “Mediterranean” networks). Such a resource should remain open to the ingestion of new data by future generations of scholars, enabling multilayered visualizations of transregional connectivity, nodal theatres, circuits of performances, and repertoire flows. While collaboration with centers for information modeling has become indispensable for this kind of large scale research, numerous problems still emerge from an approach based on prosopography and network analysis. The paper highlights some of the challenges involved in preparing such a resource ¬– from the more straightforward, well circumscribed cases of name disambiguation and role variability to gaps, biases and uneven granularity in documentary evidence; the choice of the data model to rely on, entities and categories to bring into dialogue, the management of uncertainty inherent historical data. Consideration is also devoted to the issue of long term data preservation, whose insufficient attention in the past has prevented access today to the outputs of several projects completed on the topic. The paper is also an invitation to pool forces and collectively design how to build a reusable, interoperable dataset and a set of tools to illuminate how opera moved, reshaped, and was sustained across the maritime and terrestrial routes, transforming how we understand mobility, exchange, and cultural flows in the Adriatic area.