VEdition. A Critical Digital Edition of "Goethe’s Venetian Epigrams"

This paper explains the technical details of a new model for a digital edition of Goethe's Venetian Epigrams. Starting from the photographic reproductions of Goethe's manuscripts (H 54, H 54a, H 56, H 61, H 55, H 57, H 59) it is presented a topographic-diplomatic transcription and a reconstruction of Goethe’s workflow through the analysis of his intricate microgenetic process. The critical digital edition aims not only to offer a synoptic picture of the different versions of the whole collection as well as of every single epigram, but also to engage new ways to digitally represent a ‘text in motion’. "e user will be allowed to explore the epigrams by means of a vertical synoptic representation of each verse in its different compositional stages – with regard to both the intradocument and the interdocument variations, a horizontal synoptic constellation of every stage of a single poem, and finally a rendition of the text’s metamorphosis (textum mobile). The flux of constants and variants will be made visible by the actual movement of the diplomatic transcription from one document to the other, with the possibility of color-coding autographic and allographic alterations in the process. The same rendition will be further extended to the collection in its entirety, allowing thus to display the constant movement of every epigram’s collocation within the different documents.