Ψηφιακά λογοτεχνικά αρχεία: το παράδειγμα του σολωμικού αρχείου

Abstract

The intersection between archive theory and digital technologies has generated more than technical innovations—it has challenged our assumptions about what archives are and do. Projects such as The Walt Whitman Archive, The Shelley-Godwin Archive, the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, and the Digitale Faustedition demonstrate a new understanding of the archive's role in literary studies. These initiatives raise a critical question: Should we understand digital archives as reproductions of physical collections, or as entities with their own distinct logic? This paper attempts to answer this question, based on the experience gained from the project Solomos’ Digital Archive. Solomos' holographs are the most authoritative source for his incomplete works. Responding to one of the most important challenges of Modern Greek Philology, Linos Politis proposed ―and in 1964 carried out— the photographic reproduction and diplomatic transcription of the manuscripts. Today, some sixty years later, the digital edition being implemented at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki is part of that longstanding editing tradition and at the same time follows contemporary developments in the field of digital scholarly editions. We discuss the challenges posed by the very concept of the literary archive in the digital condition, which often approximates that of an edition, as it consists not only of digital surrogates and their metadata but also of encoded transcriptions based on editorial decisions (according to the TEI standard); the work of encoding and annotating the transcribed text is what allows for multiple forms of textual representation (diplomatic, critical, genetic, reading) and for textual analysis via methods of distant reading.