Laura Mazzagufo studied Musicology at the University of Pavia and Digital Humanities at the University of Pisa. She has contributed to the Bellini Digital Correspondence project, a scholarly digital edition of Vincenzo Bellini's autograph letters held at the Museo Belliniano in Catania, and subsequently held a research fellowship at CNR-ISTC in Catania as part of the PAVES-e project, aimed at producing a hyperedition of Cesare Pavese's works. She is currently a PhD candidate in Scienze dell'Interpretazione (41st cycle) at the University of Catania, under the supervision of Prof. Daniele Piccini and Prof. Antonio Di Silvestro. Her research interests focus on the digital encoding of musical and textual sources, with particular attention to XML-based standards (TEI and MEI) and their application to digital philology and scholarly digital editing.
Research project
My research project, entitled Digital Scholarly Editions and Ontological Modelling: New Semantic Tools for PAVES-e, sits at the intersection of computational philology, interface design, and formal ontologies applied to the humanities. The project is developed within the PRIN 2022 PAVES-e project, dedicated to a hyperedition of Cesare Pavese's works, and aims at producing a digital scholarly edition of Pavese's private writings letters and diary – exploring new forms of semantic representation and computationally assisted literary interpretation.
Participation in research groups and projects
I am a member of the CHROMA (Computational Humanities: Representation, Organization, Management, and Analysis) research group at CNR-ISTC in Catania. I also participate in the COVerLeSS project (PRIN 2022), aimed at producing a corpus and digital edition of late nineteenth-century Italian literary journals in the context of Verismo. I am a member of AIUCD (Italian Association for Digital Humanities and Digital Culture).
Conference presentations (PhD)
26-27 March 2026: speaker in the seminar on platforms and digital environments for musicians (Prof. Angela Romagnoli), Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage, Cremona – University of Pavia; presentation entitled Dati, testi, relazioni: costruire un’edizione digitale.
5 March 2026: «Vive tra i libri [...], ama coi libri, dorme e mangia sempre coi libri». Il "letterato" Cesare Pavese, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria, Turin – paper: Il PRIN Pavese: parole d'autore dalla carta al digitale (with Antonio Sichera, Christian D'Agata, Liborio Barbarino, Daria Spampinato).
Teaching activities
December 2025: guest lecturer for the courses in Music Bibliography (Prof. Pietro Zappalà) and Digital Libraries (Prof. Carlo Bianchini), Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage, University of Pavia, Cremona – training day: Encoding an Epistolary Text. Methodologies, Tools, Models, and Case Studies.
June 2025: guest lecturer for the seminar Epistolary Journeys. The Letter from Parchment to Pixels (Proff. Antonio Di Silvestro and Orazio Licandro), Department of Humanities, University of Catania.
March 2024: guest lecturer in two sessions of the Laboratory of Music Text Encoding Systems (Prof. Candida Billie Mantica and Prof. Pietro Zappalà), MA in Musicology, University of Pavia.
December 2023: guest lecturer for the Digital Culture Seminars, MA in Digital Humanities, University of Pisa – talk: Bellini Digital Correspondence: Between Teaching and Research (with Pietro Sichera).
Journal articles
[under review] Mazzagufo, Laura; Spampianato, Daria; Del Grosso, Angelo Mario; Sichera, Pietro. «I libri e i fogli tutti al loro posto»: organizzazione della conoscenza in una nuova edizione digitale dell’opera di Pavese, in "Strumenti Critici" III, 2026. Under review.
[under review] Sichera, Pietro; Del Grosso, Angelo Mario; D'Agata, Christian; Grasso, Miryam; Mazzagufo, Laura; Spampinato, Daria. TEI Encoding Harmonization for Collaborative Digital Scholarly Editions Using NormaTEI, in "Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative", special issue (post-conference issue of the TEI Conference 2025, Kraków). Under review.
[in press] Del Grosso, Angelo Mario; Spampinato, Daria; Capizzi, Erica; Cristofaro, Salvatore; Mazzagufo, Laura; Sichera, Pietro. Oltre la carta. Un modello di edizione digitale delle lettere di Vincenzo Bellini, in "Bollettino di Studi Belliniani", vol. 10, 2025 (ISSN 2283-8716).
2025 – Bruno, Denise; Canzoneri, Giuseppe; Cristofaro, Salvatore; Di Silvestro, Antonio; Mazzagufo, Laura; Spampinato, Daria. Reading the works of Verism through the magazines and critics of XIXth century. Text editions, lexical maps and thematic dictionaries in a user-oriented portal, in "Umanistica Digitale", vol. 9, n. 20, pp. 1–30 (ISSN 2532-8816). DOI: doi.org/10.6092/issn.2532-8816/21302
2025 – Cristofaro, Salvatore; Del Grosso, Angelo Mario; Mazzagufo, Laura; Sichera, Pietro; Spampinato, Daria. Implementing Collaborative Digital Scholarly Editions: Insights from Bellini Digital Correspondence, in "International Journal of Information Science and Technology", vol. 9, n. 1, pp. 42–53 (ISSN 2550-5114). DOI: doi.org/10.57675/IMIST.PRSM/ijist-v9i1.297
2024 – Mazzagufo, Laura; Sichera, Pietro; Spampinato, Daria; Del Grosso, Angelo Mario. Letters and Musical Sketches. Toward a Proper Integration of Bellini's Writings, in "Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative", Issue 18. DOI: doi.org/10.4000/12na6
2022 – Mazzagufo, Laura. Bellini Digital Correspondence: le missive del maestro catanese tra didattica, filologia e Digital Humanities, in "Codice 602. Rivista dell'Istituto Superiore di Studi Musicali 'Luigi Boccherini' di Lucca", vol. 13, pp. 79–94.
2019 – Mazzagufo, Laura. Tre poesie di Montale by Roman Vlad: compositional techniques and text correspondences, in "Archival Notes", n. 4, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, pp. 17–29.
Conference proceedings
[in press] Mazzagufo, Laura. Visualizzare i colori del vero: un'edizione digitale per COVerLeSS, in "Sinestesie", n. 46 (ISSN 2280-6849), proceedings of "I colori del Vero nelle riviste del secondo Ottocento" (Catania, 29-30 May 2025).
[in press] Mazzagufo, Laura; Cristofaro, Salvatore; D'Agata, Christian; Del Grosso, Angelo Mario; Sichera, Pietro; Sichera, Antonio; Spampinato, Daria. Moving towards a Semantic Archival Edition: the PAVES-e Project, in Building Access and Accessibility, Open Science to All Citizens. ADHO Digital Humanities Conference 2025 (Lisbon, Portugal, 14-18 July 2025).
2025 – Mazzagufo, Laura; Sichera, Pietro; Bruno, Denise; Cristofaro, Salvatore; Del Grosso, Angelo Mario; Spampinato, Daria. An Infrastructural Solution for Digital Publication starting from Automatic Layout and Text Recognition: Insights from Italian Literary Journals, in "2025 IEEE 8th Congress on Information Science and Technology (CiSt)", Marrakech, Marocco/Morocco, 2025, pp. 494–499. DOI: doi.org/10.1109/CiSt65886.2025.11224217
2025 – Sichera, Pietro; Cristofaro, Salvatore; D'Agata, Christian; Del Grosso, Angelo Mario; Grasso, Miryam; Mazzagufo, Laura; Spampinato, Daria. Streamlining TEI Workflows: Collaborative Editing with NormaTEI, in New Territories. Text Encoding Initiative Conference and Members' Meeting 2025, ed. by J. Hałaczkiewicz, pp. 177–182. Kraków, 16-20 September 2025. DOI: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17312233
2025 – Mazzagufo, Laura. Modellare un'edizione digitale: rappresentazione e visualizzazione dei dati e del vocabolario per PaveseInTesto e PaveseInParole, paper presented at the Study Days "PAVES-e – Per una Hyperedizione dell'opera di Pavese", Turin, 13–14 March 2025.
2025 – Sichera, Pietro; Del Grosso, Angelo Mario; Mazzagufo, Laura; Spampinato, Daria. ZoneRW: verso un'integrazione con Kraken ed eScriptorium per il riconoscimento e la gestione avanzata delle regioni di interesse, in "Diversità, Equità e Inclusione: Sfide e Opportunità per l'Informatica Umanistica nell'Era dell'Intelligenza Artificiale, Proceedings del XIV Convegno Annuale AIUCD2025" (Verona, 11-13 June 2025), pp. 297-302. ISBN 978-88-942535-9-7. DOI: doi.org/10.6092/unibo/amsacta/8380
2024 – Mazzagufo, Laura. Una proposta di codifica in XML/MEI per testi musicali autografi di Vincenzo Bellini, in "Me.Te. Digitali. Mediterraneo in rete tra testi e contesti. Proceedings del XIII Convegno Annuale AIUCD2024" (Catania, 28–30 May 2024), ed. by A. Di Silvestro and D. Spampinato, pp. 246–251. ISBN 978-88-942535-8-0. DOI: doi.org/10.6092/unibo/amsacta/7927
2023 – Cristofaro, Salvatore; Del Grosso, Angelo Mario; Mazzagufo, Laura; Sichera, Pietro; Spampinato, Daria. Bellini Digital Correspondence: A Model for Making Collaborative Digital Scholarly Editions, in "2023 7th IEEE Congress on Information Science and Technology (CiSt)" (Agadir–Essaouira, Morocco, 18–22 December 2023), pp. 615–620. DOI: doi.org/10.1109/CiSt56084.2023.10409920
2023 – Mazzagufo, Laura; Sichera, Pietro; Spampinato, Daria; Del Grosso, Angelo Mario. Bellini Digital Correspondence meets MEI, in "Encoding Cultures". Joint MEC TEI Conference 2023, TEIMEC2023 (Paderborn, Germany, 4–9 September 2023), pp. 50–54. DOI: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10427826
2023 – Sichera, Pietro; Mazzagufo, Laura; Del Grosso, Angelo Mario; Spampinato, Daria. Metodi di armonizzazione per codifiche TEI cooperative: l'edizione 'Bellini Digital Correspondence', in "La memoria digitale: forme del testo e organizzazione della conoscenza. Proceedings del XII Convegno Annuale AIUCD2023" (Siena, 5-7 June 2023), pp. 185–190. ISBN 978-88-942535-7-3. DOI: doi.org/10.6092/unibo/amsacta/7721
Posters
2024 – Sichera, Pietro; Cristofaro, Salvatore; Mazzagufo, Laura; Spampinato, Daria; Del Grosso, Angelo Mario. CHROMA model for H2IOSC, CLARIN Annual Conference 2024 (Barcelona, Spain). DOI: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13913607