Digital Editing

The Italian literary tradition is characterized by the centrality of two elements: the ‘author’ function (editions and commentaries from the Middle Ages to the present) and the question of language (dictionaries and tools). The digital revolution has thus provided a favourable environment for both aspects: the development of monographic editions and portals and the creation of tools for the analytical study of texts. Thanks to a lively philological tradition, which in Italy had in Father Busa the founder of Digital Humanities, and in Umberto Eco one of the first authors to define a theoretical infrastructure and to use computers. In Italy, digital editions in the last thirty years have seen a remarkable development in quantity and quality. This essay analyzes the history, methods and case studies of Italian digital editions and highlights their specificities, with a special focus on digital and semantic editions and the digital enhancement of 20th-century literature, from virtual exhibitions to Data Visualization, the new hybrid practices of contemporary writing and the innovations introduced by AI.