Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
Department of Excellence 2018-2022
Friday, February 5th 2021, h. 10.30am
Zoom link: https://univr.zoom.us/j/85075888609
Seminar on Philology, Literature and DH
Digital methods for research in literature and textual criticism
Anna Bognolo and Maria Adele Cipolla, Welcoming address
Federico Boschetti, Creating and Querying Corpora Annotated Through Domain-Specific Languages
The digital annotation of literary texts is an activity which involves several (and occasionally contrasting) forces at play, such as a scholar’s freedom to add metadata that enable the research hypothesis to be answered; the legibility of the annotation also on part of specialists in the humanities but without an in-depth knowledge of the digital humanities; the need to follow standards guaranteeing interoperability with other digital resources.
The employment of Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) in the field of philological and literary studies constitutes a successful attempt at finding a balance among such forces at play. A DSL is a formal language described by a Context-Free Grammar focussing on a limited domain of knowledge conceived to carry out specific tasks. Thus, any scholar can create or customise a DSL on the basis of his/her needs, in order for the annotation to be highly legible, machine-actionable and convertible, as a whole or partially, into other standard languages (mainly XML-TEI).
The aim of this seminar is to show the principles of annotation through DSLs, presenting a number of case studies both in the field of digital ecdotics, and in that of digital hermeneutics. Finally, the seminar wishes to show how the interrogation of the annotated texts works.
Fabio Ciotti, Toward a critique of computational judgment in literary studies
What kind of knowledge about literary facts can we gain by adopting the more recent and innovative computational and mostly quantitative methods? What are the limits of their applicability in the context of literary criticism? In my talk, moving from the discussion and the critical examination of some examples of literary analysis and of the methodological underpinnings of distant reading I will try to formulate a theoretical and epistemological framework for computational literary studies based on the idea of overcoming the interpretative method as the unique way of understanding literary and cultural facts.
Franz Fischer, Back to the Future. Is digital textual criticism trapped in the past and why should we care?
Philology has developed a wide range of sophisticated methods and features for critically representing literary texts and historical documents, both in analogue and digital format. Extending and amplifying functionalities of the book, digital editions provide knowledge and information about textual transmission in quality, number and detail impossible to achieve in print. However, trapped in the past, digital philologists inadvertently diminish their future discipline's potential—threatening their very existence—and are forced to reconcile old and new philology and somehow get back to the future. After presenting some of the most notorious features of scholarly editions a possible future scenario will be sketched out for designing and integrating textual criticism into the emerging digital ecosystem.
Students and teachers are warmly invited
Project of Excellence 2018-2022
Team leaders of the literary-philological project: Anna Bognolo, Maria Adele Cipolla
Project Manager: Paolo Frassi
Director of the Department: Alessandra Tomaselli
Organization: Anna Bognolo, Maria Adele Cipolla, Giulia D’Agostino
