Online Resources for the Humanities: Interdisciplinary Perspectives.
International Seminar   May 7-8, 2004

ABSTRACT. Displaying the textual genesis on the Web: the Magrelli Genetic Machine.

The principal objective of this talk is to present an experiment in genetic philology performed by the Digital Variants team: the Magrelli Genetic Machine.

Digital Variants is an electronic archive of contemporary Italian and Spanish authors, founded in 1996 at the University of Edinburgh. The site was conceived with the idea of gathering texts in various stages of completion, whose dynamicism and textual genesis would be made visible with the help of multimedia tools. In the case of the Magrelli Machine, we explored the use of Flash, normally employed to put images in motion, to represent the evolution of a poetic text.

The theoretico-methodological basis of Digital Variants consists of variant and genése du texte studies from the Italian and French critical schools, respectively. These approaches were enriched by the addition of the psychology of composition, of textual linguistics and of cognitive science. Both the practical realization of Digital Variants and our critical reflections on the concept of digital texts, which inform the project's direction, are in their turn informed by the aforementioned theories.

Thus, I have chosen to divide my talk into two parts. In the first half, I will outline the historico-conceptual path that led the Digital Variants team to the idea of a genetic digital edition. I will begin with a brief history of variant studies, as framed by the European philological panorama, and will touch upon the birth of the genése and the notion of avant-text. I will also elaborate our idea of digital philology and the advantages presented by the genetic digital edition. In the second half of the talk, I will introduce the editorial history of genetic texts, which is the subject of the Magrelli Machine. Finally, I will describe how the Machine was constructed and demonstrate the user interface.

Biographical note

Domenico Fiormonte (Rome, 1967) received his PhD degree from the University of Edinburgh in 2001. He is currently a Researcher in Linguistics at the University of Rome III. In the last three academic years he has been teaching applied literary computing at the University of Rome Torvergata and writing for the new media at the University of Rome "La Sapienza." He has worked for two years as web project manager of the distance education courses of RAI Educational, the educational branch of the Italian public television. His research and main publication focus on electronic writing, computer-assisted second language writing, continental textual criticism, and digital philology. After earning an undergraduate degree in Italian Literature, Fiormonte spent one year at Michigan Technological University studying rhetoric and technical communication. Between 1996 and 1998 he was awarded by the Italian and Spanish governments two joint scholarships supporting research on the influence of the computer on Spanish and Italian contemporary prose. In 1996, thanks to a Faculty of Arts Postgraduate Research Scholarship, he started to build the Digital Variants Archive, an online resource on contemporary Italian and Spanish authors. He is founder and first organizer of the "Computer, literature and philology" seminar series (Edinburgh 1998, Rome 1999, Alicante 2000, Duisburg 2001, Albacete 2002, Florence 2003). For CLiP he edited two volumes of proceedings: New Media and the Humanities: Research and Applications (ed. by D. Fiormonte e J. Usher), Oxford, Oxford University Humanities Computing Unit, 2001, and Informatica umanistica: dalla ricerca all'insegnamento, Rome, Bulzoni, 2003. His latest book is Scrittura e filologia nell'era digitale, Turin, Bollati Boringhieri, 2003.

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