Teoria e forme del testo digitale ed. by Michelangelo Zaccarello (review)

Published in September 2019, this volume undertakes a critical cultural project: the presentation of a series of fundamental essays by key figures in the American tradition of textual scholarship in Italian translation. The editor, Michelangelo Zaccarello, a long-standing member of both the Society of Italian Philologists and the Society for Textual Scholarship, the American philological association devoted to the study of texts and textuality in English as well as work in other languages, is in a privileged position both to observe the discontinuity between the Italian and the Anglo-American philological environments and to put these different scholarly traditions in meaningful dialogue through a common focus on the promises and challenges of the digital.

Indeed, the diverse essays in the volume are united by their interest in the deep modifications that the digital medium effects in the processes of text production, circulation, and reading, as well as its consequences for editorial practice and philological research. While the volume usefully touches on subject areas still underrepresented in Italian textual studies (e.g., the textual reliability of e-books or of texts digitalized with Optical Character Recognition), its central concern is with the philological questions posed by born-digital texts. Here, Zaccarello calls for new attention to digital materiality and proposes that many of the practices associated with traditional textual scholarship (e.g., paleography) remain relevant to philological research in the digital horizon. Far from being an oxymoron, the "material digital", he argues, is manifest both in the born-digital text itself and in the hardware and software used for the production and preservation of the text. Zaccarello also summons us to consider the impact of the digital on our thinking about such traditional subjects as authorial intention, the diffusion of errors, and the conservation of transitory variants.

The essays in the volume encompass both complete translations and key excerpts of published works. The work of the textual scholar and theorist Jerome McGann opens the volume with an essay challenging and complicating the notion of authorial intention through an analysis of the many social and historical agents involved in the production of the literary text. McGann's paradigm-shifting work is followed by Susan Hockey's reflections on the ways in which digital textuality—mark-up language, image manipulation, etc.—revolutionizes knowledge access. In line with these topics, the third chapter foregrounds the work of Paul Eggert on the durability and interoperability of digital resources and their cooperative production and fruition, while the fourth chapter, featuring the work of Peter Shillings-burg, considers the methodological and practical approaches to realizing digital archives and editions.

Collectively, the essays by McGann (1983), Hockey (2004), Eggert (2005), and Shillingsburg (2014) establish the coordinates of Anglo-American digital textual scholarship and open the way for the presentation of new work by Matthew Kirschenbaum ([2016] Chapter 5) on born-digital literature; by Maurizio Borghi and Stavroula Karapapa ([2013] Chapter 6) on mass digitalization and its implications for copyright, with a case-study on Google Books; by Peter Robinson ([2016] Chapter 7) on the essentially collaborative nature of digital editing; by Diana Kichuk ([2015] Chapter 8) on the reliability of texts on the internet and the inherent problems of OCR; and by Paul Conway ([2011] Chapter 9) on the scholarly dangers of commercializing digitalization projects. The volume comes full circle with a final chapter by Jerome McGann from his recent work The Republic of Letters (2014). At once a meditation on history, memory, the archive, and the crucial role of the digital in the transmission of our cultural heritage, McGann's work is also a clarion call for a return to philology, that is, to the philological perspective that will help us to build digital resources as complex and capacious as the time-honored codex. The "Afterword" by H. Wayne Storey surveys the evolution of the discourse from its early theoreticians, Ronald McKerrow and W. W. Greg, to its more recent pioneers (many of whom are included in this...