Response of Monica Berti

The Intertextuality workshop held at the Fondation Hardt has been particularly helpful to show the importance of digital tools for understanding the phenomenon of intertextuality and getting more results about the relationships among texts.

I have particularly appreciated the group discussion on the second day of the workshop, where participants have been able to discuss about the meaning of intertextuality and its application to different texts and different levels of “textuality” within a text and among texts.

The workshop has focused the attention of the participants on three main topics that are strictly connected to intertextuality: 1) philology; 2) commentary; and 3) publications.

The understanding and rethinking of these three topics are fundamental in order to expand the role of the humanities and to create new scholarship. I think that the role of sholars now is to focus on criteria for defining a new open philology that helps creating open collections of machine-actionable linguistic sources, new annotated corpora, and new workflows for, and forms of, publications. Behind that, there is also a need to redefine criteria and rules for assessing scholarly products in order to include digital tools and especially contributions of young scholars to digital philology.

I would also add a fourth topic to the ones mentioned above, i.e. teaching, because now there are various tools that may help students to learn ancient languages and work directly on ancient sources. These tools may also be an answer to the big crisis of the humanities and the financial cuts that have affected many schools and departments of Classics around the world. I think that scholars have the duty to rethink their disciplines and therefore their teaching.

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