Elena Pierazzo

Digital Scholarly Editing : Theories and Practices

The Catalogue of Digital Editions gathers digital editions and texts in an attempt to survey and identify best practice in the field of digital scholarly editing. It provides an accessible record of standards and building technologies used, and thus an insight into past and present projects.This volume presents the state of the art in digital scholarly editing. Drawing together the work of established and emerging researchers, it gives pause at a crucial moment in the history of technology in order to offer a sustained reflection on the practices involved in producing, editing and reading digital scholarly editions—and the theories that underpin them. The unrelenting progress of computer technology has changed the nature of textual scholarship at the most fundamental level: the way editors and scholars work, the tools they use to do such work and the research questions they attempt to answer have all been affected. Each of the essays in Digital Scholarly Editing approaches these changes with a different methodological consideration in mind. Together, they make a compelling case for re-evaluating the foundation of the discipline—one that tests its assertions against manuscripts and printed works from across literary history, and the globe. The sheer breadth of Digital Scholarly Editing, along with its successful integration of theory and practice, help redefine a rapidly-changing field, as its firm grounding and future-looking ambit ensure the work will be an indispensable starting point for further scholarship. This collection is essential reading for editors, scholars, students and readers who are invested in the future of textual scholarship and the digital humanities.

Digital Publishing Seen from the Digital Humanities

This article provides an overview of digital humanities activities that relate to publishing. Digital humanities is a growing scholarly domain, defi nitions of which vary but which generally involves the application of computers to research questions that fall within the traditional remit of the humanities. It includes many areas of research that overlap with publishing. An important aspect of digital humanities is therefore to question assumptions that digital publishing should produce faithful visual reproductions. We argue that this cannot be the only objective of digital humanities publishing, and rather that publishing needs to be understood as a range of modelling activities that aim to develop and communicate interpretations, whether consciously or not. The article introduces a selection of digital humanities publishing standards and systems that support a fl exible digital representations of objects, such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), which emphasizes scholarly fl exibility and collaboration.

La macchina nel tempo. Studi di informatica umanistica in onore di Tito Orlandi. Lorenzo Perilli and Domenico Fiormonte (eds.).

The book contains fifteen papers collected in honour of Tito Orlandi, professor of Coptic language and literature at the University of Roma ‘La Sapienza’, who has distinguished himself for his pioneering contributions to the Digital Humanities, to Digital Classics in particular, and to digital textual scholarship in general. The festschrift opens with a dual introduction, a preface by Lorenzo Perilli and the Controcanto (‘counter melody, contrapuntal’) by Domenico Fiormonte; both editors of the collection revisit their personal, long-standing acquaintance with Tito Orlandi and his role in their (as well as many other young scholars’) personal intellectual and academic careers. Alongside these more intimate and personal recollections, the relevance and importance of Orlandi’s position at the heart of the development of Digital Humanities in Italy also emerges with clarity. A catalogue of Orlandi’s publications in the field of Digital Humanities follows. The essays have been collected in 2010 but some of them represent slightly revised reprints of previously published material (Ballo and Parodi, Fiormonte and Numerico, Ciotti, Guercio, Perilli, and Moscati); this gathering of previously scattered contributions is certainly helpful for the reader can now find in one place many contributions which were previously available only in publications which are not easy to access. Most of the essays present an introductory overview or a state of the art of different disciplinary takes on Digital Humanities (exceptions are Ballo and Parodi, Buzzetti, Roncaglia, Lana, and Buonincontro). These overview essays make this book a valuable introductory reading on Digital Humanities for a wide, uninitiated readership. The opening contribution by Fiormonte and Numerico gives an historical overview of the evolution of computation technologies and the evolution of how scholars in the Humanities have dealt with the machine (‘the machine in time’ is a possible translation of the title of the festschrift). At the other end of the volume, Tomasi’s contribution sandwiches the book by giving a comprehensive catalogue of DH-related resources, such as centres for research, associations, conferences, journals, blogs, and websites. Given Orlandi’s interest in scholarly editing, it is no surprise that papers on digital editions of texts are well represented; in particular, the contribution of Fabio Ciotti deals with markup languages, and their use in the edition of texts; his evaluation of the pros and cons of XML is very balanced and the alternatives are handsomely discussed. The paper by Buzzetti is connected to Ciotti’s but has potentially broader implications. Buzzetti represents the most theoretical contribution of the collection; as is typical for his work, he leads his readers into an increasingly theoretical speculation on the nature of markup embedded into text, arguing for its added semantic value beyond the mere representation of existing features. The article by Perilli enters more forcefully into debates of textual scholarship, lamenting the scarce support for editors that is offered by modern tools, as well as arguing for better scholarship on digital editions of classical texts. The overview of classical studies offered by Perilli’s contribution should probably now be read in the light of more recent work represented by the excellent volume edited by Bodard and Mahony (2010) which was presumably published too late for the author to consider it in his overview. In addition, on scholarly editing is the article by Ilaria Buonincontro, which offers a more methodological insight into the modelling of digital editions. Reviews