About Bit Philology

Today, much literature is created digitally. Literary archives, which preserve the manuscripts of writers, increasingly include digital documents and supports (known as born-digital), such as floppy disks, computers and hard drives. The Bit Philology project will propose innovative solutions for describing, editing and analysing digital literary archives, thereby meeting the scientific and societal needs of our digital age.

Two big circles with a hole in the middle, their surface is covered with radial sectors and rings (similar to trees) colored by various red shades — A floppy disk, seen as magnetic traces. Both sides of one disk, showing the raw magnetic signal a drive reads before it becomes files. Each thin ring is a track (a circular path the read head follows). The finely striped grey wedges are sectors (blocks of data), the lighter bands are the markers between them, and the smooth, even area on the right is empty filler space at the end of each track.

Philology is a discipline that is thousands of years old. Textual scholars have studied and continue to study papyri, manuscripts, epigraphic and printed sources, and have developed methodological tools to work with texts preserved in different forms and on different media. But what happens when a text is born digital? A growing number of born-digital texts are currently being archived, including documents of historical importance and literary material. This project focuses on the latter, the born-digital literary archive, as a source for the philology of the present and the future.

Scholarship on born-digital sources [note 01] has identified the need for a rethinking of traditional methodologies in order to transform the born-digital source into a scholarly object of study. The Bit Philology project seeks to respond to this need by describing, editing and analysing born-digital literary sources. The aim of the project is to establish a methodological and technical toolkit for the study of born-digital literary sources created before the advent of cloud computing. The project is highly interdisciplinary and will combine approaches from digital humanities (data modeling, distant reading); authorial philology (filologia d’autore) and genetic criticism (critique génétique); the philological tradition concerned with the materiality of textual documents (filologia materiale, material bibliography, digital forensics); media and software studies; information design.

Note 01—Born-digital materials are texts and documents created on computers rather than digitised from paper.

Advisory Board

The project is accompanied by an international advisory board. Its members are scholars based at universities and research institutes in Europe and the United States, and their work covers the fields the project draws on: born-digital archives and digital forensics, digital scholarly editing and text encoding, textual scholarship, archival science, computational literary studies, and digital humanities.

Emmanuela Carbé (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia)
Paola Maria Carmela Italia (Università di Bologna)
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum (University of Virginia)
Elena Pierazzo (Université de Tours)
Thorsten Ries (The University of Texas at Austin)
Francesca Tomasi (Università di Bologna)
Joris van Zundert (Huygens Institute — KNAW)