Introduction to Author, Authorship and Literary Creativity (Chapter n. 3), in Digital Humanities and Artificial Intelligence: From Theory to Practice

The Italian literary tradition is characterized by the centrality of the "author function", which has marked the entire history of literature, starting from the “codice degli abbozzi” with which Petrarch, in the mid-14th century, decided to leave a testimony of the genesis of his work, inaugurating a tradition of author "scraps" that have marked the history of western creativity. Now, through Digital Humanities (DH) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), the authorial 'function' can be investigated in all type of manuscripts: from autograph to apograph, from apocrypha to fake. The application of automated methods to famous literary cases, such as the fake autograph of Leopardi's Infinite or the Posthumous Diary of the pseudo-Montale, have shown the usefulness of an integrated approach not only in the resolution of philological cases, but to investigate more analytically, the mechanisms of literary creation and the multiple forms in which authorship express itself, precisely at the moment of fragmentation and sharing, in the digital ecosystem, of textual responsibility.