This two-day workshop has been a fruitful occasion to meet scholars who, like we, agree about the practical utility of DH in order to solve a secular (or better, millennial) problem. Since Philology’s origins, the transit and the reuse of the elements of a text into another have always been considered as one of the main objectives of our discipline. It is now time to improve, adapt and, to a certain extent, create from the beginning digital libraries provided with IT research tools capable of analyse texts in order to catch sight of their mutual echoes and relationships. This way, one will identify every (aware or unaware) presence of memory of a poet within the rewriting activity of every other poet, so that what is usually just postulated, or also proved in an occasional and extemporaneous way, can find objective – or rather, ‘scientific’ – confirmations. The more or less systematic and complete textual exegesis mast be accompanied, sustained and presumably anticipated by accurate data analysis.
During the five centuries of the ‘Gutenberg age’, disciplines studying the ancient world and its cultural tradition almost always guided interests of everyone aiming at a quantitative analysis of texts – one of the most important tasks of Philology. Whose history, as everyone knows, comes from far, because it started in the Museum with the Homeric exegesis, advanced in schools thanks to Alexandrine and Roman grammarians and lexicographers; after the dark ages, towards the end of the Middle Ages, the Parisian disciples of St. Thomas drew up the first concordances of the Holy Scriptures, while elsewhere new general and special Indexes and Lexica were elaborated. With Humanism, during the Modern Age and, most of all, in the second half of the 19th century, such tools evolved, assuming printed forms more and more advanced and ready to be digitized, as happened during the 1990s, when personal computer appeared. The scholars of klassische Altertumswissenschaft cleared the way for experimentations in IT processing and analysis of texts; such a fact only surprises those who are unaware of the (already broadly described) pathfinder role played for centuries by the as daring as versatile philological and exegetical practices. Another peculiar feature of ancient literary universe should not be neglected: its anticipative arrangement of its documents in textual corpora far-back close, not so subject to substantial changes or increases, therefore acquirable by the new archives in their almost total integrity: and all this though the term ‘integrity’ can be out of place, taking account of the losses suffered by the overall tradition during the High Middle Ages. Everyone well knows to what extent the Western literary system is characterized, from Homer on, by a considerable boost to conscious emulation and systemic imitation, as well as to extemporary temptation of occasional furtum, or to every kind of unaware – therefore ‘guiltless’ – drawing; although the phenomenon of the so-called intertextuality has been surely theorized and deeply investigated, it could be perceived in an adequate manner only when investigation is carried out on huge digital thesauri, provided with a memory incomparable, for their size, with the human one.
Current word retrieval procedures outclass every previous tool of word inquiry for the vastness of query fields: Latin Philology and digital text. The simultaneous research of literary prototypes within epigraphic poetry, hundreds of authors and thousands of texts. For the perfection of query: for example, when querying just parts of words (themes without possible suffixes, internal vocalic oscillations and so on), or just one or more composition elements (also minimal, such as suffixes and endings); or when trying to identify word junctures or even minimal portions, constituted by segments immediately subsequent or at a short distance; or peculiar positions of words within a verse or a prose sentence (in the beginning, in the end, after punctuation marks), and so on. If, on the one hand, the use of IT on the most part of traditional ‘humanistic’ disciplines seems to carry little contraindication, on the other hand strong impulses come from IT for reinvigorating studies, in particular the historic-literary ones: also because IT allows to revert to a kind of investigations – rarefied or outdated over the last century – which could be defined ‘scientific’, because based on stable and objective data and carried out according to declared and shared protocols, with easily verifiable outcomes. Once upon a time, the so-called Quellenforschung was carried out after a prior complete reading of texts and a possible verification with the printed tools available at that time, followed by accurate manual filing elaborated by philologists, almost always young academic researchers starting their career, or senior scholars involved in their Inauguraldissertationen, Habilitationschriften and Programmabhandlungen; these were correct, solid and decorous dissertations, written in Latin more often than in German, imaginatively entitled, for example, De ratione quae inter Vergilium et Lucanum intercedat, or Ennio quid debuerit Catullus, or, conversely, De Martiale Catulli imitatore, and so on.
But today, the intertextual investigation on every linguistic-literary field – so not necessarily ‘ancient’ – is carried out with an unimaginable speed of elaboration and certainty of results, so that critics can face capillar analyses on lists of documents preselected and prearranged by a computer. For just one example, the Latinists who across the last twenty years studied the morphological features of the poetic texts, and wanted to interpret a single stilistic feature or a peculiar metrical feature of Lucretius or Propertius, had to use partial printed tools, not complete and, above all, not intercommunicating; now, on the contrary, machines allow them to find and investigate in a very short time all recurrencies – none excluded – of a single word, of a word juncture, of a peculiar aspect of a linguistic phenomenon, even of an adfix or a not too common ending, either within the provenance context or the overall archives. This way, one can explore the entire literary system, in its continuous historic development, so that the best feature of the so-called ‘new philology’, or however its main advantage, comes from a variation of the scale of problems which can be faced and solved thanks to the application of its methods. To sum up, it is more and more necessary to create hugh corpora by creating a good consortium between thinker factories and working groups.
Thank you very much to Lavinia, to Damien and to all of you, Paolo