TY - JOUR
AU - Schmidt,, Desmond
AB - Abstract Although most would agree that the future of the scholarly edition lies in the digital medium, it is the print scholarly edition that is still more often cited and read. The production of digital scholarly editions (DSEs) is still seen as an experimental field whose methodology has not yet settled to the extent that a digital editing project can be approached with the same confidence as the making of a print edition. This article describes an experimental conversion of a print scholarly edition—Giacomo Leopardi’s Idilli by Paola Italia (2008)—into a DSE. This posed a challenge due to the complexity of its internal evidence, but was also relatively short and suitable for an experimental edition. Our objective was to assimilate into a web-based DSE all the information contained in the text and apparatus of the print edition. We also sought to discover whether the making of a DSE today that could fully utilize the affordances of the web, would necessarily place a significant technical load on editors who are more accustomed to solving textual problems. We review briefly a number of generic tools for making DSEs and describe two attempts at making our own DSE of Leopardi’s Idilli: a wiki edition whose primary purpose was pedagogical and a DSE based on the software used to make the Charles Harpur Critical Archive (Eggert, 2019, Charles Harpur Critical Archive. http://charles-harpur.org). We compare these experiences and draw conclusions about the prospects of making DSEs today. The digital scholarly edition (DSE) remains something of an enigma. Few would dispute that the future of the scholarly edition lies in the digital medium, but it is still the print scholarly edition that commands respect and is the one most often cited and read (Porter, 2013). The production of DSEs is still seen as an experimental field where methodology has not yet settled to the extent that editors can approach a digital editing project with the same confidence as in print (Robinson, 2016). This article describes an experimental conversion of a print scholarly edition into a DSE. The edition chosen was Giacomo Leopardi’s Idilli by Paola Italia (2008). This included a detailed genetic apparatus of the main manuscript, the Neapolitan Notebook, a fair copy manuscript revised in a number of discernable phases. This text had the advantage of being, on the one hand, a challenge due to the complexity of its internal evidence, and on the other hand, it was relatively short and suitable for an experimental edition. Our objective was to assimilate into a digital medium, in this case, the Web, all the information contained in the text and apparatus of the print edition. We also sought to discover whether the making of a DSE today that could fully utilize the affordances of the Web, would necessarily place a significant technical load on editors who are more accustomed to solving textual problems. As is the case with many scholarly editing projects, the significance of the author and the works to be digitized must first be established. Further, we argue below that the peculiar nature of the revisions to the main manuscript of Leopardi’s Idilli, the Neapolitan Notebook, requires a careful choice of technological solution, and cannot be represented satisfactorily by tools designed for different materials, or for other kinds of editions. In addition, we take the view that a DSE is much more than the sum of its source documents, and if present, its critically established text. Every work also has an elaborate historical context that is the natural key to understanding it (Price, 2008; Eggert, 2009; Muri et al., 2016). Accordingly, in Section 1, we provide an overview of Leopardi’s life and a background to the Idilli. In Section 2, we examine the state of the Neapolitan Notebook and Leopardi’s writing technique. Section 3 describes the technical realization of the edition: a summary of a longer survey of tools for making DSEs (Schmidt, 2018) and descriptions of the two successive attempts at realizing it: the earlier wiki edition and the subsequent edition prepared with Ecdosis, as used in the Charles Harpur Critical Archive (CHCA; Eggert, 2019). In the conclusion, we draw on these experiences to make some general remarks about the making of DSEs today. 1 Leopardi and His Idilli1 Giacomo Leopardi (Recanati 1798–Napoli 1837) was one of the most significant Italian poets. Even in the nineteenth century, when knowledge of his works was not yet widespread, Leopardi was already regarded as an author of international stature; writers and thinkers of the calibre of Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve and Friedrich Nietzsche, and later Walter Benjamin and Samuel Beckett, were among his admirers. Born in a small village in the Papal States, he was mostly self-taught from his father’s well-stocked library. His interests were chiefly the Greek and Latin classics, the bible and ancient history. From 1817, at the suggestion of Pietro Giordani, he began to devote himself to the writing of literature, especially poetry. His first publication in 1818 consisted of two songs on political and civil topics (‘All’Italia’ and ‘Sopra il monumento di Dante che si preparava in Firenze’), which criticize his own time as one of insensitivity and death, while comparing with regret the vitality of the past (Natale, 2018). Leopardi developed a ‘historical pessimism’. Nature and classicism are seen in a positive light as the youth of mankind. Typical of the contemporary view, the reason given was that man had been alienated from a state of original happiness. However, during 1819, this idea began to falter, coinciding with the onset of personal health problems. In Leopardi’s reflections, the ‘true’ took the place of ‘beauty’, the world was described as ‘horrible’ and passions became dormant. The writing of ‘imaginative poetry’ had been made impossible by civilization and was, therefore, a prerogative of the ancients. Modern people could only devote themselves to ‘sentimental poetry’, which emanates from philosophy and experience (Tellini, 2001). The definitive renunciation of the idea of a benevolent nature occurred around 1823 and was so painful for the writer that it led him to abandon poetry temporarily. In this period, he composed and published the Operette Morali, prose compositions that mocked anthropocentrism. With this conversion to philosophy, Leopardi’s pessimism was no longer connected with history and became instead existentialist. Nature was primarily responsible for humanity’s unattainable desire for happiness. Therefore, both the moderns and the ancients were victims of its cruelty and condemned to unhappiness, since their quest for happiness could not be fulfilled. ‘Evil’ was therefore not accidental but simply resulted from ‘the order of things’ (Tellini, 2001). In his final period, symbolized by the poem ‘La ginestra’, Leopardi broached the idea of a possible solidarity between men against the oppression of nature. These developed thoughts of Leopardi can be reconstructed by reading his most important work: Canti, a collection of forty-one poetic works, published in different editions between 1831 and 1845. The book of Canti did not follow a precise design, but gradually took shape through continuous adjustments and attempts, as witnessed by its different editions. This is not a traditional collection of verse but a modern book of poetry, and served as the main model for Italian poetic works of the twentieth century. The texts are not organized metrically or thematically, but in accordance with the need of the subject to express his emotions, constantly listened to and analysed. The ultimate purpose of the work can be found in an overall reading of the book, and in its criss-crossing of thematic lines (Natale, 2018). The Canti are implicitly divided into several sections and yet each composition has its own history and complete meaning. One of these sections is named Idilli (Idylls), comprising six poems in hendecasyllables composed between 1819 and 1821. They are called ‘idylls’ because, as in the classical idyll, the representation of the landscape is the starting point for the study of the subject. Leopardi himself described the idylls as ‘situations, affections, historical adventures of my spirit’ (Disegni Letterari, 1828), emphasizing the emotional and subjective nature of these compositions. The Idylls comprise ‘Alla Luna’ (originally ‘La Ricordanza’), ‘L’infinito’, ‘Lo spavento notturno’, ‘La sera del giorno festivo’, ‘Il sogno’, and ‘La vita solitaria’. They were all printed together in this section in the various editions, except for ‘Lo spavento notturno’, which in the Naples edition (1835) appears as one of the Frammenti. This change in position was because this idyll is more dialogic than the others, the story being narrated in the third person (Blasucci, 2017), which further confirms the subjectivity of the section. Although they are morphologically different, the Idilli are linked by an incipit where the elements of nature are recalled in an emotive and evocative way. But this apparent quietness is disturbed by the narrator, who only can only speak critically of the serenity of nature. This disillusionment overpowers the imagination and the idyll becomes a kind of anti-idyll (Tellini, 2001). For example, in ‘L’infinito’, the most famous of the idylls, the occasion for reflection is given by a contemplation of the horizon, impeded in its entirety by the presence of a hedge. The limit imposed by nature is surpassed through the imagination (‘Io nel pensier mi fingo’, v. 7), which leads the mind to sink into immensity. This motion, however, is tinged with pleasure and dismay, and condensed into the final metaphor of the shipwreck (Natale, 2018). The denunciation of Nature’s hostility is even more evident in ‘La sera del giorno festivo’. The ecstatic contemplation of the lunar night (‘Dolce e chiara è la notte e senza vento’, v. 1) is soon marred by a melancholy occasioned by the indifference of a woman he had loved, and by the transience of all things (Natale, 2018). Beyond their value as poetic texts, the Idilli have a complex and interesting textual history. For this reason, they were among the first and most important subjects for Italian Philology of the Author (Variantistica). 2 History of the Neapolitan Notebook and Leopardi’s Writing Technique The Idilli were written in the Neapolitan Notebook, which can be found in the Vittorio Emanuele III library in Naples (Fondo Leopardi, C.L. AN XIII 22) designated by the siglum AN.2 The same library holds many other papers by Leopardi, a sign that the author, who still carried around these papers with him even after their publication, considered that they preserved a valid textual history. This was also the case with the Idilli, first printed (except for ‘Il sogno’) in two instalments in the Nuovo Ricoglitore (NR) of December 1825 (‘L’infinito’ and ‘La sera del giorno festivo’) and in January 1826 (‘La ricordanza’, ‘Il sogno’, ‘Lo spavento notturno’, and ‘La vita solitaria’), based—perhaps indirectly—on a second manuscript deposited in the community of Visso (AV). The subsequent edition entitled Versi, printed at Bologna in 1826 (B26) used the same ordering as in NR and AV. It was then republished in the volume of Canti of 1831 (Florence: Piatti F31), and in its final printing in the life of the author in 1835 (Naples: Starita N35) the third Idyll, ‘Lo spavento notturno’, was removed from the Idilli and placed instead without a title, among the Frammenti as number XXXVII (Fig. 1). Fig. 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Renumbering and renaming of the Idilli Fig. 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Renumbering and renaming of the Idilli The Neapolitan Notebook is a booklet made by Leopardi himself by folding and trimming the margins of ruled sheets already used previously, and numbering the pages thus obtained from one to seventeen: even numbers on the top left and odd numbers on the right. Those who previously studied this notebook have remarked that the writing both on the baselines and in the corrections shows that the texts were written and corrected at different times. Of course, as with all the manuscripts of Leopardi, these are not first drafts but fair copies (Italia, 2018). The reading order of the Idilli in the Neapolitan Notebook follows their order of composition: La ricordanza (p. 1); L’infinito (p. 2); Lo spavento notturno (pp. 3–4); La sera del giorno festivo (pp. 5–7); Il sogno (pp. 7–12); La vita solitaria (pp. 12–17). The fact that the texts were not written in a single moment, but at different times can be deduced from internal and external evidence. The first three idylls: ‘La ricordanza’, ‘L’infinito’, ‘Lo spavento notturno’, belong to an initial phase which goes back to 1819. The second phase of composition began in 1820 and produced ‘La sera del giorno festivo’, which was written in the Spring and Autumn, while ‘Il sogno’ and ‘La vita solitaria’ belong to the third phase and were written in the following year. Although it is true that these three phases of composition belong to the successive years 1819, 1820, and 1821, it is also true that Leopardi intended to attribute the entire series of Idilli to the initial moment of their creation. The date ‘MDCCCXIX’, deliberately placed under the general title of Idilli in the Visso Notebook, in the version printed in the NR and in the volume of Versi of 1826, emphasizes their stylistic unity and distinguishes the Idilli from the Canzoni, published in 1824, which established the alternate style (Italia, 2016). As a result of an analysis of the holograph carried out using high-definition digital copies (Italia, 2008, 2016), it is possible to discern that the poems were written in three compositional phases: ‘La ricordanza’ (p. 1); ‘L’infinito’ (p. 2); ‘Lo spavento notturno’ (pp. 3–4) ‘La sera del giorno festivo’ (pp. 5–7) ‘Il sogno’ (pp. 7–12); ‘La vita solitaria’ (pp. 12–17) The use of different pens designated A (baseline Phase 1), B (baseline Phase 2) and C (baseline Phase 3), and a reddish pen used for sporadic corrections (D). It is clear that when Leopardi began writing a new group of texts he would re-read the previous ones, making corrections. So, in Pen B, he wrote ‘La sera del giorno festivo’, and then used it to correct the three preceding texts: ‘La ricordanza’, ‘L’infinito’, and ‘Lo spavento notturno’. Likewise, when he wrote the fifth and sixth idylls with Pen C, he corrected the preceding four using the same pen. This method of correction is most evident in ‘La sera del giorno festivo’, written in Pen B, which when compared to A is much thicker, heavier and of a darker ink, and with which Leopardi carried out various corrections on re-reading the first three texts, so linking them stylistically to ‘La sera’. The same thing happens in the third phase of the Idilli, with the draft or fair copy of ‘Il sogno’ and ‘La vita solitaria’, written in Pen C, which has a finer ductus and a lighter ink than that used for ‘La sera’, and in which Leopardi retrospectively corrected the preceding four texts. The relative similarity between Pens B and C makes it harder to establish with certainty whether a correction belongs to one or the other phase based solely of the writing stroke, ductus, and ink colour. Sometimes, however, other factors can be used to establish the order of corrections with relative certainty. This is the case with the title of the third idyll, ‘Il sogno’, which was corrected into ‘Lo spavento notturno’ in a stroke, ductus and ink attributable to Pen C, which was used to write the last two idylls: ‘Il sogno’ and ‘La vita solitaria’. This correction became necessary as soon as Leopardi wrote ‘Il sogno’ (which relates a real dream by the poet), having the same title as a preceding idyll, which was then renamed ‘Lo spavento notturno’ (‘The night fright’). On analysis, each text thus contains, apart from corrections carried out late by the pen used to write on the baseline, several series of corrections. It is significant that texts with the most corrections are the first three, on which are deposited corrections in Pens A (base-text), B (first series of corrections, contemporary with the writing of ‘La sera del giorno festivo’), C (second series, contemporary with the writing of ‘Il sogno’ and ‘La vita solitaria’), and D (third series, in reddish ink). Of particular interest is the series of corrections carried out on the first three texts in Pen B, with which Leopardi wrote the fourth text: ‘La sera del giorno festivo’. This pen has a darker ink that is particularly evident in Fig. 2. Fig. 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Corrections in Pens A and B to Lines 7–8 of ‘La Ricordanza’ Fig. 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Corrections in Pens A and B to Lines 7–8 of ‘La Ricordanza’ In the first text, Pen B was also used to carry out a correction of the title from ‘La Luna o la Ricordanza’ to ‘La Ricordanza’ (Fig. 3), and to restore the original reading of Line 2: ‘or volge’. The same pen was used to carry out corrections to Lines 7–8. Fig. 3 Open in new tabDownload slide The title of ‘La Ricordanza’ in the Neapolitan Notebook Fig. 3 Open in new tabDownload slide The title of ‘La Ricordanza’ in the Neapolitan Notebook 1.1 Pen A 1 a le mie luci | Il tuo viso apparia, perchè dolente 2 il tuo bel viso | Al mio sguardo apparia, perchè dolente 1.2 Pen B 3 a le mie luci | Il tuo volto apparia; che travagliosa In the critical edition by Franco Gavazzeni, published in 2006, and extended by the inclusion of Poesie Disperse in 2009, the book of Canti was published on the basis of final authorial intention: namely, the Starita edition of 1835 with corrections carried out in the hand of the poet (N35c), but also including for study purposes the last reading of the manuscripts with a genetic apparatus of the corrections. However, in the case of the Idilli, since the last preserved manuscript is that of Visso (the fair copy prepared for print publication in 1826), the Gavazzeni edition contained a transcription of the Visso manuscript (AV), while the Neapolitan Notebook was represented only in the apparatus. The edition by Italia (2008, 2016) remedied this omission by publishing a complete transcription of the Neapolitan Notebook, with a genetic apparatus of the corrections, by distinguishing, as described above, the various pens, which permit a diachronic study of the language used by Leopardi in some of his most famous texts. 3 Technical Realization This situation with the Leopardi manuscripts is unusual in that it is possible to identify multiple internal states in which the author left the manuscripts at some point in time. These are effectively versions, identified by the various pens. In editions of other writers, these are sometimes called ‘revision campaigns’ as in Melville’s Typee manuscript (Bryant, 2006), or in Samuel Beckett (Van Hulle and Nixon, 2017). Especially with other authors, alterations in the same pen and hand often occur within a single writing phase. This is the case with Fig. 2: it is not known whether the change from ‘a le mie luci | Il tuo viso apparia’ to ‘il tuo bel viso | Al mio sguardo apparia’ was carried out before or after the alteration to the title from ‘La Luna o la Ricordanza’ to ‘La Ricordanza’, shown in Fig. 3. Both changes are attributed to Pen A. However, in their immediate contexts, the local temporal sequence of such changes is usually not in doubt. For example, it is clear that ‘La Luna o la Ricordanza’ was changed to ‘La Ricordanza’ and not the other way around. The position of the super title ‘Idillio’ directly above ‘La Luna’ also indicates the likelihood of an intermediate state: 1La Luna → 2La Luna o la Ricordanza → 3La Ricordanza. Such revisions are far more common in early drafts of poetic texts, as can be seen, for example, in the manuscripts of the poet Friedrich Hölderlin (Sattler, 1976), Valerio Magrelli (Fiormonte et al., 2010), or Charles Harpur (Eggert, 2019). In addition to these basic levels of versioning phenomena, there are also of course separate physical drafts, as can be seen in the case of Leopardi with the Neapolitan Notebook, the Visso Manuscript, and the various print editions. This leads to a basic hierarchy of versions: separate physical copies writing phases or revision campaigns within a single manuscript internal manuscript changes within a single global revision state Thus the overall variation across the entire testimony of a work can be quite complex, especially since revisions of Type 3 in early drafts of poetic texts can be very heavy. Although the Leopardi manuscripts are fair copy manuscripts rather than first drafts, still one should look to developing some way to represent any situation—for example, the extraordinarily complex first draft of Valerio Magrelli’s ‘Campagna romana’ (Fiormonte et al., 2010). So a system that can cope with an arbitrary density of variants must allow these three cases to be distinguished to avoid information overflow. A DSE has also to develop some way to represent the transcriptions in a form that will facilitate the kinds of interactions typically found in major DSEs, such as comparison, searching, viewing, and editing. The proper handling of these complex requirements would have required extensive software development with commensurate cost, which was beyond the means of the editorial team. They needed a free, web-oriented, and easy-to-use interface that would not require the installation or development of complex software. This is what motivated the initial choice of wiki technology. 3.1 The wiki edition Siemens et al. (2012a) suggested that DSEs could be made using social media tools, and demonstrated this by producing a ‘social edition’ of the Devonshire manuscript using wiki technology (Siemens et al., 2012b). The main advantages of using wikis are that collaboration is enhanced, contributors can leverage their existing knowledge of wiki markup, and both annotations and the display of text and page images together become possible. The drawbacks are an increased risk of hacking attack and malevolent actions (Crompton et al., 2015) and the inability to compare versions (Brown, 2016). However, the pedagogical aspects of wikis, enabling students to develop transcription skills, to practice collecting source materials and to collaborate in producing an edition seemed to us to make this possibility worthy of further development. Wiki Leopardi (Caterino and Nieddu, 2017) is a customization of MediaWiki intended to serve as a DSE of Leopardi’s Canti. MediaWiki is a popular wiki platform used in Wikimedia and many other projects. It had been successfully used in 2010 to create Wiki Gadda (Giuffrida and Italia, 2011), a digital platform for projects relating to the Italian writer Carlo Emilio Gadda. Wiki Gadda has been tested on a collaborative DSE of Gadda’s Eros e Priapo (Italia, 2013, pp. 218–223). Its objective was to display authorial variants and their type with a single click. The wiki apparatus did not use abbreviations and represented the different phases via separate pages. Every variant was thus turned manually into a link that led to a new page containing the revised reading. The same method is used in Wiki Leopardi, although in this case the project was based on the print critical edition of the Canti by Gavazzeni. The critical accuracy of the digital editions of Wiki Gadda and Wiki Leopardi is ensured by a full understanding of the mode of representation (Bonsi and Italia, 2016, pp. 116–18), by collaboration among scholars and by careful critical review. The Wiki Leopardi project was initiated by Paola Italia as part of the advanced Italian Literature course held at the University of Rome La Sapienza in 2016. Its aim was to teach the students how to make a critical edition. The Wiki’s collaborative features allow students to modify content and structure directly in the web browser, in accordance with a set of common guidelines. The cooperation and the simplified markup language, combined with a rich text editor, are the main advantages from a didactic perspective: even someone without an in-depth programming knowledge can contribute to the project using basic operations of text formatting and editing. The student learns how a DSE and its functions may be constructed, is introduced to new functions of the digital world, and can collaborate in the creation of a tool that is useful and accessible to everyone. To ensure the success of the edition and its critical validity, there is also an opportunity to check and correct amendments made by the participants. The digital scholarly Wiki edition costs almost nothing to maintain, which is a considerable advantage over a print edition, and even permits some innovations. To explain how a platform like Wiki Leopardi can contribute to the study of Leopardian philology, it is necessary to reconsider the nature of the editorial task. The textual history of Leopardi’s Canti that ends in 1836 with an edition revised by the author, consists of different stages, some of which were formalized in print editions. The first two Canti (‘All’Italia’ and ‘Sopra il monumento di Dante’) were initially published in 1818; then, in 1824, the Canzoni were published (some in periodicals, like ‘Alla sua Donna’). Then, in 1826, Leopardi published the Versi, an edition that included the Idilli. These two collections subsequently formed the basis, with significant amendments, of the Canti of 1831. This edition was extended in 1835 and finally revised by the author in 1836. The most important innovation is thus the organization of this vast collection of material: Gavazzeni’s print edition only presented the final authorial intention. But in the Wiki Leopardi, it is possible to navigate across every print edition, augmented by facsimiles of the material sources. Wiki Leopardi thus offers a comprehensive digital reproduction of all the print editions. Being free of space constraints, it can present the textual stages more clearly and show the different layouts of each edition. For example, it is possible to read the critical edition of the Versi of 1826, which has never been published. From a graphical perspective, it also shows all the paratextual elements—Leopardi himself claimed to be sofisticchissimo (extremely refined) in the design of print editions. Wiki Leopardi also makes the critical apparatus of the paper editions easier to follow. A typical page of the digital edition represents the textual transcription next to the facsimile copy of the original page, while the links at the top provide access to other editions. In the text, the variants are highlighted in yellow and linked to a page showing the evolution of all the variants at that point. In spite of the advantages of low cost and accessibility, using MediaWiki as a platform for a DSE revealed some serious limitations. The interface is hard to customize and the digital environment was designed originally to handle the creation of new documents on the web, not to make a digital edition of pre-existing works. For a complex philological problem such as that posed by the tradition of Leopardi’s texts, MediaWiki is only useful for representing the print editions. It is unable to show the manuscripts adequately, their complex phases of revision, their inline and marginal variants. Internal revisions within phases are also hard to represent, automatic comparison between versions is not possible, and there is no satisfactory way to link page images to the corresponding text. 3.2 Survey of DSEs These shortcomings spurred the editors to look further afield for alternative editing platforms. MediaWiki had proven adequate as a teaching platform but was far less suited as a way of presenting a DSE capable of performing the kinds of interactions that scholars, editors, and general readers would need. At this point, we conducted a survey of available software for producing DSEs (Schmidt, 2018). We started by looking at thirty custom-built DSEs based on Sahle’s catalogue of twenty-eight ‘interesting’ DSEs (2017). This was expanded by the inclusion of the digital edition of La Dama Boba (Presotto et al., 2015) and the Shelley-Godwin Archive (Fraistat et al., n.d.). An analysis of these editions revealed the following recurring interactive features: Text and facsimile side by side (seventeen editions) Timeline (eight editions) Side-by-side text comparison (six editions) Table of variants (four editions) Searching (twenty editions) Manuscript viewer (five editions) Annotations (eight editions). All of these features were deemed to be desirable for our edition of Leopardi’s Idilli, but building our own custom site would have meant developing our own software from scratch, which would have been very expensive (Vanhoutte, 2009). We decided therefore to examine a number of generic edition-building programmes and services. These were TEI archiving, publishing, and access service (TAPAS, Flanders and Hamlin, 2013), scalable architecture for digital editions (SADE, Vanscheidt, 2018), Ediarum (2010), Text Encoding Initiative computer-human interaction (TEICHI, Pape et al., 2012), Versioning Machine (VM, Schreibman, 2016), edition visualization technology (EVT, 2016), and Juxta Editions (2015). However, our analysis of their capabilities revealed that none of them supported more than two of the above-mentioned interactive features. TAPAS (Bauman et al., 2016) is a publishing service for TEI encoded data. The XML transcriptions are formatted in various ways and page images are available in separate popup windows. It has a cross-project search facility and a separate index for components of the edition (chapters, paragraphs, etc.). SADE (Vanscheidt, 2018) was developed for TextGrid and requires the TextGrid Eclipse software although it can publish to a website. Its capabilities seem to resemble TAPAS, although this is unclear from the available documentation. Pape et al. (2012) who review SADE in more detail report that it is difficult to set up. Ediarum (2010) is a publishing platform of the Berlin-Brandenburg Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW). It uses XML-technologies and TEI encoding. There are several editions on the website of which the Edition Humboldt Digital is the most advanced. Although it has indexes for persons and places and a basic timeline, the use of xquery scripts gives it the look of a print edition (Dumont and Fechner, 2013). TEICHI (Pape et al., 2012) publishes in the Drupal content management system (CMS). It consists of a search, viewing, and download module. The markup is based on TEI-Lite so it would not be able to handle the complex revisions found in most modern manuscripts. Page images are available but are not integrated into the text display. The VM Version 5 is the latest iteration of Susan Schreibman’s text comparison tool originally produced in 2002 (Schreibman, 2016). The latest iteration supports annotations, side by side compare with synchronization via highlighting rather than scrolling. Images are in popup windows loosely connected with the text, as in TAPAS. The VM requires that all textual variations are encoded in a single file, which is then split into separate views. Given the complex layering, internal versions and reordering of the Idilli this would require the editors to master complex markup. EVT (Rosselini del Turco, 2016) is a text and facsimile side-by-side tool enhanced by search and a list of named entities. Although well designed from a user perspective, it focuses on the creation of critical editions of medieval rather than modern manuscripts. EVT 2.0, currently incomplete, adds side-by-side comparison view, similar to the VM, and likewise requires complex markup. Juxta Editions (2015) is a commercial service that allows the publication of TEI-XML texts on the Web. The XML editor accepts only TEI-Lite tags, and variants are removed before comparison between documents (Juxta, 2013). It has three visualizations: text+facsimile horizontally and vertically with image magnify and side by side compare. We also considered using the Drupal and Joomla! CMSs. These had been used previously by one of the authors to develop the digitalvariants.org site (Fiormonte, 2008) and for the AustESE project (Osborne et al., 2013). Our experience here indicated that CMSs are designed for the management and creation of new web content, not for the representation of pre-existing historical documents, and customizing them to provide any significant subset of the visualizations enumerated above would be very challenging. Our survey thus led us to conclude that generic tools for making DSEs are not yet powerful enough for our purpose, and custom editions are too expensive. So we reached something of an impasse. When Paul Eggert gave a lecture in October 2017 at the University of Bologna it became clear that many of these problems had already been overcome in his digital edition of Charles Harpur, who, like Leopardi, was a romantic poet of a comparable period (1813–68). Although it currently lacked an annotation tool all other features used in the survey could be implemented in a generic way for other editions. The Ecdosis editing system used in the CHCA was also a close match for the Leopardi manuscripts. It was based on a layers and versions model of text (Schmidt, 2019), which mimicked our own analysis of the Neapolitan notebook. So it was decided to prepare a pilot edition: we would encode Leopardi’s sequence of six idylls using Ecdosis, including all print versions, and the two manuscript versions, which had not been included in the wiki edition. 3.3 The pilot edition with Ecdosis Although it was designed as a general set of web tools, this was the first time that Ecdosis had been applied to another editorial project. Conversion of the print and wiki editions into Ecdosis took only 12 days of part-time work. At that time Ecdosis’s own WYSIWYG-based editor was still incomplete and it was decided instead to encode the text in a basic XML format and import it. The XML files were created by copying from the wiki edition and from a PDF of the print edition. The page images were also copied from the Leopardi wiki. The detailed textual notes of the print edition were used to create separate files for each of the identifiable versions—both the separate physical copies and the internal phases within the manuscript copies. Within each version changes were encoded via the usual <add> and <del> codes and our own <undeleted> code for alternatives that were not cancelled. The Ecdosis import tools were used to split the corrections and their contexts into separate layers, amalgamating local levels of correction into coherent sub-versions. Although these layers were never written by the author and were not treated as separate versions, they are still useful as a storage mechanism to record local changes within a version (Schmidt, 2019). In this way individual layers remain simple, needing only a few codes to denote changes in format, such as lines, headings, and stanzas, since all deletions and insertions have already been converted into layers. Figure 4 shows an example of how this process works for a segment of Idyll 3, ‘La ricordanza’, from the Neapolitan Notebook. Fig. 4 Open in new tabDownload slide Segment of ‘La Ricordanza’ with colour highlighting of layers and writing phases represented by Pen A (red) and Pen B (blue) Fig. 4 Open in new tabDownload slide Segment of ‘La Ricordanza’ with colour highlighting of layers and writing phases represented by Pen A (red) and Pen B (blue) Finally, the separated versions, phases, and layers of each poem were stripped of their remaining markup, which in Ecdosis is stored separately and recombined with the text for display, so reducing each version/layer to a readable plain text file. This greatly simplifies all subsequent text processing such as searching, comparing, and hyphenating when compared to the complexity of the original XML. It also facilitates editing in the WYSIWYG web editor. During importation, the page images were also linked to the text. The linking produces a list of images that scrolls in sync with the text to keep the top and bottom of each page image aligned with its corresponding position in the text. To provide a smooth transition and accurate alignment between text and image when scrolling all other possible alignment positions are calculated in proportion to these fixed points. Changing the version loads the relevant images on the left-hand side of the screen and the corresponding text on the right. Layers within a version can be selected by clicking on a tab above the text, and changes between layers are highlighted. This replaces the need for a ‘diplomatic’ display where changes are displayed above or below the line using inline formats. In side-by-side compare view differences between versions and layers are shown at the character level: deletions on the left-hand version/layer in red and additions on the right-hand version/layer in blue. When displaying a layer the invariant text is shown in grey to indicate that this is not a true version, but true versions and final layers are displayed in black. As in the twin page image and text display, scrolling is also synchronous, the invariant text being aligned left to right across the middle of the display, regardless of differences in length between the two currently displayed versions. Table View resembles the traditional critical apparatus. Differences and similarities between versions/layers are arranged in columns. Versions/layers can be excluded from comparison and the table rebuilt. Also versions can be moved up or down the display to explore specific clusters of variation for editorial purposes. The establishment of a reading text from this information could be encoded as another version and added to each poem as a default text. 3.4 The Ecdosis back-end The above visualizations are all in the front-end or public-facing view of the edition. The back-end is another view of the same edition intended for editors. Although only a few of the back-end tools are currently in use, we intend to gradually expand the site to include all of them and add the corresponding visualizations to the front end. So we will briefly describe all the back-end tools here, already fully implemented in the CHCA, since this shows the future direction of the Leopardi site. Many DSEs contain documents describing the edition or providing biographies, academic essays, etc. In Ecdosis, this need is met with a Miscellaneous Editor, which edits and stores documents in Markdown format (Gruber, 2019). The Gallery tool is used for uploading and viewing images used on the website, which may be referred to in the miscellaneous documents. The Events Editor allows editors to maintain a list of events in the life of the author. This can be used to construct an interactive timeline, as can be seen on the Charles Harpur site. There is a News Editor for adding news events and announcements, and an integrated bug-tracking tool for entering and responding to suggestions for improvement or problems with the site. The Places tool allows the storing and annotation of geographic positions, connected either with a date or with information about an important site in the life of the author, which is displayed via a Google map interface in the front-end. There are also several minor tools that manage login, display of lists of editable documents and projects, etc. The two import tools, the Splitter and Merger, were used to create this edition and may also prove useful for other projects, since many existing websites already have transcription data in XML format. The Splitter can read any XML file, and using a customizable configuration file, split it into several copies or layers, each of which represents a specific level of local correction. Depending on the heaviness and type of corrections, the XML files may first need to be revised to ensure a satisfactory split, although this was not needed in Leopardi’s case because the XML files were expressly written for the Splitter. The Merger tool (Fig. 5) separates the markup into two sets: (i) page references and (ii) all remaining markup. The two classes of markup are merged into separate files: one for page references and one for other markup. The merged files combine all the versions/layers of that class of data that belong to the same work. The residual plain text (all markup having been removed) is also merged in the same way. Each merged file is a mathematical lattice or partial order consisting of text fragments taken from all layers/versions and arranged implicitly into a variant graph (Schmidt and Colomb, 2009). Once the merged file is generated, all complex forms of visualization, in particular the side-by-side compare, the table view and the twin image-and-text views in the front-end become possible. Since all differences between versions and layers have been precomputed, comparison between any two states of the text is instantaneous.The WYSIWYG editor allows human editors with little technical knowledge to edit one layer or version of a poem at a time in a purely visual way, akin to working in an ordinary word processor. All editing is handled directly in the web browser. This is achieved by exploiting the ‘contenteditable’ attribute of HTML, supported by all major web browsers, which allows the user to edit the text of a web page directly. The user can change the text, create or merge poetic lines, or apply formats. On save, the edited HTML of the web page is converted back into the standoff representation, which stores only the abstract properties of the HTML, and re-merges the result back into the edition. An example of an abstract format would be ‘address’ or ‘underlined’ in a letter. Abstract properties are stored in the class names of three generic HTML elements: <p> or <span>, and then formatted appropriately using standard CSS. Figure 6 explains how the process works for a single edit/save cycle. At the time of writing, the editor has been used to create and edit transcriptions of around 280 letters in the CHCA. This includes many poems embedded in letters. However, the editor is not yet fully generalized. It currently uses a manually specified list of formats which correspond to those used in the Harpur letters. What still needs to be done is to read the formats dynamically from the CSS file that describes the source documents belonging to any edition. Development of the editor has been difficult, especially given the hidden complication that, depending on context, line breaks may designate newlines in poetry (an explicit metrical unit), ordinary line breaks in poetry and prose (not a metrical unit) and paragraph end (two newlines in succession). But the non-technical users of the Harpur edition recently expressed satisfaction with the current state of the editor. Fig. 5 Open in new tabDownload slide Importing XML or HTML using Splitter and Merger Fig. 5 Open in new tabDownload slide Importing XML or HTML using Splitter and Merger Fig. 6 Open in new tabDownload slide Conversion of standoff properties to HTML while editing Fig. 6 Open in new tabDownload slide Conversion of standoff properties to HTML while editing 4 Conclusion It is currently difficult to make DSEs. Generic tools are not powerful enough to allow the creation of fully featured websites and are mostly designed for editions of printed texts or medieval manuscripts. Users of print scholarly editions are accustomed to the multiple affordances of print, such as readable texts, indices, an apparatus of variant readings, annotation, background information, facsimile editions and concordances, etc. Providing digitally based analogues of these features is difficult, though not impossible, as this experiment with the small but complex edition of Giacomo Leopardi’s Idilli demonstrates. The pilot edition has mostly been a success (Schmidt et al., 2019). There are still some difficulties with the encoding of marginal alternatives which cannot be placed with certainty in the text. These will probably be encoded as annotations instead. Another problem is that the modules in Ecdosis and the website itself currently resemble too closely those of the CHCA and will, therefore, need significant customization to their look and feel. 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Footnotes 1 In a spirit of collective planning and discussion, Milena Giuffrida is responsible for Chapter 1, Paola Italia for Chapter 2, Simone Nieddu for Chapter 3.1, Desmond Schmidt for Chapters 3.0, 3.2. 3.3, 3.4, the Introduction and Conclusion. The authors would like to thank Paul Eggert and Domenico Fiormonte for having contributed, with friendship and helpfulness, to the transition from ‘print’ to digital philology; and Dr Mariolina Rascaglia of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Vittorio Emanuele III in Naples, for having facilitated the study and implementation of the digital edition of the Neapolitan Notebook of the Idylls. 2 See the single manuscripts of Idilli in Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III Digital Library http://digitale.bnnonline.it/index.php?it/121/linfinito-1819, and the entire notebook in the World Digital Library https://www.wdl.org/en/item/10691/. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of EADH. All rights reserved. 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TI - From print to digital: A web edition of Giacomo Leopardi’s Idilli
JF - Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
DO - 10.1093/llc/fqaa022
DA - 2020-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/from-print-to-digital-a-web-edition-of-giacomo-leopardi-s-idilli-csn8qRROkI
DP - DeepDyve
ER -