Constitutio textus: Establishing the critical text

The topic of the Fourth Meeting on Digital Philology is the establishment of the critical text, traditionally referred to as the constitutio textus. For texts from the Antiquity and the Middle Ages, this usually includes a recension of the witnesses, typically concluding
with a stemma. However, the recension does not specify how an edition should be designed, whether it is a printed or a digital edition. More specifically, an editor has to decide to which degree he or she wants to use the result of the stemmatic recension as the basis for the constitutio textus, i.e. the selection and weighing of sources for the edited text. Traditionally, classical scholars have been more
reconstructive in their approach than medieval scholars.

The meeting will be divided into two consecutive sessions, each containing 6–8 papers. For the first session, the planning committee has invited a selection of international scholars to present their view of the Stand der Forschung in the field (in alphabetical order):

Thomas Bein (Aachen), Marjorie Burghart (Lyon), Tuomas Heikkilä (Helsinki), Caroline Macé (Leuven), Francesco Stella (Siena), and PaoloTrovato (Ferrara).

Call for papers

For the second session, comprising 6-8 papers, the committee is now making a call for theoretically and methodologically informed papers on:

•  Stemmatology in theory and practice
•  The Lachmannian approach (old and new)
•  From qualitative to quantitative methods
•  Quantitative methods applied to stemmatology
•  ‘Old’ vs. ‘New’ (or ‘Material’) Philology
•   The study of variants
•   Digital editing of texts from the manuscript age

Proposals should be submitted in the form of an abstract (max 800 words) by the 15th February 2012. The planning committee and appointed referees will review abstracts and select papers. The authors of the selected papers will be notified of their status by the end of May 2012.

The official languages of the meeting are Italian and English. Consequently, abstracts can be submitted in one of these two languages.
If your proposal is accepted and you plan to give your talk in Italian, you are kindly requested to use English either in your handout or in
your Powerpoint slides. This would help participation in the final discussion.

Please note that talks should last no more than 35 minutes. 10 more minutes will be available for questions. Make sure that people do have time for questions at the end of your presentation (do not exceed 35 minutes).

Submissions of abstracts and other enquiries

Please submit the abstract of your paper as a Word or PDF file to Dr. Raffaele Cioffi (dphilology[at]gmail.com). He will also help with general enquiries about the meeting. The conference web site is available at the
URL http://www.filologiadigitale.it/.

Venue

Sala Convegni del Banco Popolare, Via San Cosimo 10, Verona.

There is no charge for attending the meeting. The meeting will extend from lunch on Thursday 13 to lunch on Saturday 15 September.

Accommodation

Please see the list of hotels in central Verona, in Word or in PDF.

Unfortunately, we cannot by now guarantee the speakers in the call for papers section any reimbursement for their travel and accommodation expenses. Partial or full refund will depend upon availability of funds.

Planning committee

Maria Adele Cipolla
University of Verona

Marina Buzzoni
Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

Roberto Rosselli Del Turco
University of Torino