Manzoni's electronic interpretations, in The Mechanic Reader. Digital methods for literary criticism

According to the assessment that the better mechanic reading of a text is the one which needs a human goverment, the research group of Sapienza University (Paola Italia and Claudia Bonsi) and Bologna (Fabio Vitali and Angelo D'Iorio), has been applying the diff and the versioning - a software versioning based on single words and not on line of code or structural note - to I Promessi Sposi, the most famous italian novel and a distinguish case study of variants. The mechanic tool named Philoeditor, detects automatically the differences between the two variants - the Ventisettana and the Quarantana - and shows them on line. It can be applied to every kind of version of texts, but it is only the starting point. As a wiked diff is able to represent the two versions mechanically, and to show them to the users (vertically or horizontally oriented), the reader (and the scholar) can use Philoeditor to classify different kind of phenomena: from the methods of corrections to the category of corrections: linguistic, stylistic, but also theoretical one. The direction is very promising. The fact that readers can annotate changes and can propose their own analysis of the text is a further value of this methodology which can, in the future, mark texts on line, leaving a sign of a non mechanical reading, made with mechanical methods.