Why are there no comprehensively digital scholarly editions of classical texts?

Currently, no 'canonical' classical text with a multi-testimonial tradition has a digital scholarly edition based on a complete digital transcription of all primary sources, and on the automated collation of those transcriptions. Most classicists simply do not feel that they need such editions. I argue that this is ultimately due to the 'canonization' of the corpus of classical texts. Classicists are more focussed on the 'Text' than on the documents (manuscripts) and their texts: they tend not to consider the textual variance in the manuscripts as culturally meaningful in itself, but merely instrumental in view of the constitutio textus. I suspect that we will not have 'comprehensively digi…

Metodi digitali per l'insegnamento classico e umanistico

Il volume propone una riflessione critica di carattere metodologico su alcuni strumenti e tecniche digitali per l'insegnamento scolastico ed universitario in ambito umanistico, con un'attenzione particolare alla didattica delle lingue, letterature e culture classiche. Per ciascuno strumento digitale, si valuta se esso comporti un effettivo miglioramento dal punto di vista dei metodi, alla luce di alcuni obiettivi e principi educativi generali: sono presentate e discusse solo innovazioni digitali che, in chiave costruttivista, rendano l'apprendimento più attivo, più critico, più creativo e più orientato verso un contributo positivo alla società. Una serie di proposte didattiche accompagna la…

ALIM (Archivio della Latinità Medievale dItalia). Storia, attualità, prospettive di una banca-dati di testi mediolatini

Nella prima parte dell'articolo (paragrafi 1-3), Edoardo D'Angelo ha scritto sulla storia e gli obiettivi di ALIM. La seconda parte dell'articolo (paragrafi 4-10), scritta da Paolo Monella, discute gli aspetti informatico-umanistici della transizione del progetto ALIM da una codifica procedurale (HTML) e proprietaria dei testi e dei loro metadati a standard descrittivi (TEI XML) e open source, e propone in chiusura una riflessione sui modelli di collaborazione tra umanisti, umanisti informatici e informatici all'interno del progetto. In the first part of this article (paragraphs 1-3), Edoardo D'Angelo wrote about the history and goals of ALIM. In the second part (paragraphs 4-10), Paolo Mon…

"… But What Should {I} Put in a Digital Apparatus?" {A} Not-So-Obvious Choice: New Types of Digital Scholarly Editions

We propose to develop / expand the concept of “digital edition of a text”. The specific value of a digital edition is not only in the digital form of representation of textual information: dynamic rather than static, resulting in better visual or practical usability, but it mainly lays in the ability to work with computational methods on the text and on the information it conveys. Therefore the digital edition of a text should aim to provide adequate data and functionality to further forms of processing. Hence the idea that the “digital scholarly edition” until now often identified with the “digital critical edition”, can also take other forms focused on other types of ‘scholarly research’:…

"Tea for two": the Archive of the Italian Latinity of the Middle Ages meets the CLARIN infrastructure

This paper aims at showing how integrating the Archive of the Italian Latinity of the Middle Ages (ALIM) into the ILC4CLARIN repository can provide mutual benefits. Making ALIM available to a large community of scholars and researchers, on the one side, represents the first step to reduce the lack of resources for Medieval Latin in CLARIN and, on the other side, constitutes an unprecedented contribution to not only linguistic investigations, but also to the studies of the culture and science at the basis of the Western European society. The paper describes the adopted approach aiming to keep intact the structure of the archive and its metadata, which are both accurately mirrored into the IL…

Towards a digital model to edit the different paratextuality levels within a textual tradition

In the textual tradition of a literary work, our sources (manuscripts, printed books etc.) commonly bear, together with the "main text", different kinds of "paratexts" commenting on it (including interlinear annotations, glosses, scholia, footnotes, modern scholarly introductions and commentaries, and many others). This article proposes a unified model for a document-based digital critical edition including both the 'main texts' and the 'paratexts' as they appear in different single sources. The problematic aspects of such an "enlarged" digital edition are discussed, including the relations between the different 'paratexts' and the 'main text' they refer to 'within each single textual sourc…

Scritture dimenticate, scritture colonizzate: sistemi grafici e codifiche digitali

L'articolo discute due esempi di come le attuali tecnologie di codifica digitale rappresentino in modo errato gli script non occidentali, in particolare i sistemi grafici dell'India (Devánāgarī) e del Medio Oriente (arabo). Le codifiche digitali come Unicode ereditano tre rigidi principi dalla stampa: (A) 1 ↔ 1, un grafema corrisponde a una lettera; (B) 1 = 1, tutti i grafemi (es. Vocali, consonanti) hanno lo stesso stato; (C) 1, 2, 3…, la scrittura è una sequenza di elementi tutti sullo stesso "livello". Questi principi, tuttavia, non si applicavano ai sistemi grafici europei medievali scritti a mano e non si applicano oggi a quelli non occidentali, compresa la loro versione stampata. In D…

The Politics of code. How digital representations and languages shape culture

A sustainable work flow for a multi-layer edition of the Chronicon by Romualdus Salernitanus

My experimental scholarly digital edition of the De nomine by Ursus Beneventanus tested the feasibility of the edition model theorized by Orlandi 2010, based on three different layers of text representation (graphematic, alphabetic and linguistic) and on a table of all graphemes having distinctive value in the graphic system of a specific manuscript (“graphematic table of signs”). Its work flow, however, proved to be very time-consuming. This talk analyzes the specific practices of the Ursus edition that mostly slowed down the work flow and outlines possible solutions to be applied in my ongoing digital edition of the Chronicon by Romualdus Salernitanus. Those aspects include (a) the markup…

Extending the DSE. LOD support and TEI/IIIF integration in EVT

Current digital scholarly editions (DSEs) have the opportunity of evolving to dynamic objects interacting with other Internet-based resources thanks to open frameworks such as IIIF and LOD. This paper showcases and discusses two new functionalities of EVT (Edition Visualization Technology), version 2: one improving the management of named entities (f.i. personal names) through the use of LOD resources such as FOAF and DBpedia; the other, providing integration of the published text with digital images of the textual primary sources accessed from online repositories (e.g. e-codices or digital libraries such as the Vaticana or the Ambrosiana) via the IIIF protocol.

L'edizione critica digitale. La critica del testo nella storia della tradizione

The traditional output of philological work aiming at the constitutio textus is the print critical edition with apparatus footnotes showing select variant readings. The digital scholarly edition, instead, is not constrained by the space limits of the printed page, so it can encode and visualize synoptically many versions of a text, as found in different textual witnesses. This opportunity has often been exploited by New Philology editions, in which textual versions are juxtaposed without any attempt to reconstruct an "original" text. However, the digital critical edition can constitute a "third way" between constitutio textus and New Philology: the digital editor can provide different versi…