Luciano Longo

The project presents the genetic digital scholarly edition of the poetic working notebooks (scartafacci) of Attilio Bertolucci, consisting of 63 authorial documents (manuscripts and typescripts) held at the Archivio di Stato di Parma (Fondo Bertolucci, Busta II, fasc. 4), datable between 1930 and 1937 and attributable to the formative phase of his poetic work.

The materials include drafts, working copies, texts with stratified corrections, multiple revisions, and authorial notes. The edition treats writing as an ongoing process rather than a stabilized product, formally addressing the unfinished nature of these texts, in the tradition of authorial philology and of Contini's criticism of the scartafacci.

From an editorial and computational standpoint, the corpus is entirely encoded in TEI‑XML P5. The architecture of the genetic apparatus adopts the method of parallel segmentation, declared in <variantEncoding>, and uses exclusively the pair <app>/<rdg>, without recourse to <lem>, in order to represent the coexistence of the different textual virtualities without lemmatic hierarchization.

The redactional phases are modelled as concurrent textual layers (tb0, tb1, T1, T2, critical text) and are related to one another through an internal apparatus that records immediate and late variants, wholesale rewritings, deletions, additions and reprises.

Particular attention is devoted to the material dimension of the writing. The TEI markup includes the codicological description of the sources (<msDesc>), the identification of the hands and writing implements (<handNotes>), as well as the fine-grained marking of graphic and corrective phenomena by means of <add>, <del>, <space>, <gap>, <unclear> and <supplied>.

The edition further integrates the systematic linking of text and image through the <facsimile> module, allowing the alignment between textual units and digital reproductions of the autographs by means of <graphic> and <pb>.

The GitHub repository constitutes the formal home of the editorial project and documents the entire workflow: complete TEI files, structure of the genetic apparatus, encoding criteria, organization of the sources and methodological declarations contained in the <teiHeader>. The repository is conceived as an open resource for the study of Bertolucci's writing and as a model of digital genetic edition applicable to other authorial corpora.

The Manoscritto di Populonia is an unfinished novel project developed by Elio Vittorini between 1959 and 1961, preserved as fragments across an extensive collection of manuscript and typescript papers. The editorial tradition has handed down a stabilized text on the basis of the posthumous editions of the 1970s, but without a genuinely systematic collation of the authorial sources.

The research takes as its starting point the study of the manuscript sources and from the central role of the red typescript (dsR), the only materially verifiable source bearing authorial interventions, never taken as the editorial pivot in the printed tradition. The analysis calls into question the primacy attributed to a typescript that is today untraceable (dsN^*), highlighting the distance between authorial will and editorial will.

The article “Molteplicità testuale e movimenti compositivi nel Manoscritto di Populonia”, published in 2018 in Umanistica Digitale, constitutes the first formal outcome of the research. In it a genetic-documentary reconstruction of the fragment is proposed, showing how the text should be interpreted not as a stabilized product, but as a narrative process in the making, traversed by rewritings, blank spaces and alternative nuclei.

Starting from these premises, the ongoing study develops the hypothesis of a genetic digital scholarly edition of the Manoscritto di Populonia, founded on the stratigraphic reconstruction of the writing. The project takes the manuscript as the primary site of narrative planning and interprets the incompleteness not as an accident, but as a structural form of the text.

From a methodological standpoint, the digital edition is based on XML‑TEI encoding P5 and on a genetic-variantist model oriented toward the representation of textual plurality. The digital environment makes it possible to display the different competing textualities and to render the compositional dynamics of the narrative project, placing the reader before a mobile and non-teleological textuality.

The case of Populonia is approached as a critical laboratory for the study of unfinished narrative of the second half of the twentieth century, in dialogue with Vittorini's theoretical reflection on the concept of design, of the modern city and of writing as an exploratory activity, as it also emerges from contemporary texts and from the reflections collected in Le due tensioni.

State of the research

• Published article: 2018 (Umanistica Digitale)
• Genetic-editorial study: in progress
• Digital critical edition: in planning

This section gathers projects dedicated to seventeenth-century mystical writings produced in contexts of doctrinal scrutiny, in particular female and lay-tertiary autograph texts characterized by glosses, quotations and corrective declarations inserted as devices of theological self-justification.

The common element of the corpus is not the devotional genre, but the presence of a functional and regulative intertextuality: biblical quotations, liturgical references, Teresian formulas and metatextual glosses that intervene at the points of maximum doctrinal exposure, operating as semantic enclosures within an inquisitorial or para-inquisitorial regime.

The project takes as its founding case Il Castello dell'anima by Sister Teresa di San Geronimo (Palermo, late seventeenth century), a unique manuscript preserved at the Biblioteca Comunale di Palermo. In this text mystical writing takes shape as a closely scrutinized process: the authorial voice proceeds by advances and immediate rebalancings, entrusted to glosses, explicit declarations and stabilizing quotations.

From a methodological standpoint, the section develops an integrated interpretive TEI + controlled AI model, designed to make observable and measurable functions traditionally described only in qualitative terms. TEI annotation formalizes intertextual occurrences as functional units, endowed with attributes for rhetorical function, risk class and impact index.

The AI component operates exclusively in expert-in-the-loop mode: it does not interpret the text, but generates controlled counterfactual variants (removal of glosses, relocation of quotations, simulated additions), on which it is possible to test in a replicable manner their effects on argumentative clarity, local cohesion and perceived doctrinal stability.

The model is conceived as transferable: not exclusive to the Castello dell'anima, but applicable to analogous corpora of mysticism, asceticism and spiritual direction in the post-Tridentine age, allowing comparisons grounded on common units and metrics.

Data architecture

• Genetic digital critical edition
• XML-TEI P5 encoding with a dedicated ODD
• Versioned repositories (TEI, variants, logs, scripts)
• AI pipeline with deterministic seeds and audit trail