Paolo Monella, L'edizione sinottica digitale: una terza via
The traditional output of a constitutio textus is the print critical edition with apparatus footnotes. The digital scholarly edition, instead, can provide a synoptic view of the different manuscript versions of a text, since it is not constrained by the space limits of the printed page. To implement this visualization, alternative encoding and processing strategies can be used, including (a) the TEI XML P5 module "textcrit: Critical Apparatus" with software such as TEI Critical Apparatus Toolbox) and (b) an automatic collation (with software such as Juxta o CollateX) of full transcriptions of each witness with the TEI module "transcr: Transcription of primary sources". Synoptic editions often reflect a New Philology approach, in which textual versions are juxtaposed without any textual critical reconstruction of an "original" text. However, the synoptic digital scholarly edition can constitute a new "third way" between constitutio textus and New Philology: the digital editor can provide the reader with individual versions of a text, thus better presenting the "history of the tradition" (G. Pasquali), and also attach a further version to them, the editor's textus constitutus, conceived as a "working hypothesis" (G. Contini) adding itself to the textus constituti of each previous scribe-scholar (L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson).
Paolo Monella Curriculum
DH bibliography
Paolo Monella home page