Evolution or Revolution? Digital Philology and Medieval Texts: History of the Discipline and a Survey of Some Italian Projects

Broadly speaking, digital philology encompasses the field of textual criticism and editorial scholarship in the electronic medium. More precisely, it engages with the interaction between ICT Information and Communication Technology (ICT) systems and the philological study of documents/texts which have been converted into digital format. Within the ample domain of digital philology, a difference is drawn between ‘digital philology’ in a general sense (also referred to as ‘electronic philology’) and ‘computational philology’ (Bozzi 207): while the former refers to the digitization of texts displayed in a hypertext environment, the latter designates a combination of editorial practices which include the development of specific software tools and applications to facilitate interaction between both editors and readers with the electronic medium.