Textology in the Digital Age

Abstract

The field that is called textology in Slavic countries (originally given that name in Russia in the 1930s), and textual scholarship in English, has been, in recent decades, developing along with information technology, which has significant implications for textological scholarship. Thanks to the constant improvement of every element of computer architecture, as well as to the ever-rising number of computer and internet users, the spreading wave of democratisation of knowledge have not ebbed. For literature and literary theory, this has meant digitalisation and the emergence of digital editions. Over the years we have seen terms such as electronic hypertext editions, dynamic editions, digital archives, knowledge sites, projects, thematic research collections, digital libraries, digital scholarly edition 2.0 etc. The terms “edition”, “archive” and “project” were retained; the latter, however, does not necessarily entail scholarly pursuit, while “archive” gained a component of editorial work on top of the basic meaning. Among the most comprehensive and modern digital editions of writers of new literature are the Walt Whitman Archive, Johann Wolfgang Goethe: Faust Historisch-Kritische Edition, The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, Les manuscrits de Stendhal, as well as the Cervantes Project. A digital edition can contain both a critical and a diplomatic edition, digitized sources and a surfeit of supporting material, while a similar printed edition would be much more expensive to produce and less practical to use. Recently, steps have been taken to free the screen of the shackles of the printed page format, and this has led to the preference for scrolling through the text. Interactive facsimiles and the gamification of documents are in development, and once they are perfected, especially considering that such text can be searched, these digital scrolls, as we have dubbed them, are likely to be considered older and supplementary tool compared to codexes, which will assume the form of virtuality.