Dear all,
I would like to report briefly on the DIGIMED conference (http://web-linux.unisi.it/tdtc/digimed/) held last week in Arezzo - Italy.
The University of Siena-Arezzo (specifically the Dipartimento di Teoria e Documentazione delle Tradizioni Culturali and the Centro Interdipantimentale di Studi sui Beni Librari e Archivistici) and the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London were involved as European partners (together with the Italian foundation Fondazione Ezio Franceschini) in the organisation of the international seminar entitled "Digital Philology and Medieval Texts".
The event has been successful on different levels and from different perspectives:
- first of all the programme itself was rich and combined both scholars presenting the most advanced humanities computing approaches to philology and scholars keen on the traditional methods of philology.
Many presentations and discussions revealed that the latter - the traditional methods of philology - are very much perceived as not adequately represented by the available digital resources and tools. In some cases, these critics are the results of a basic misunderstanding: is up to the philologist as such to develop a "proper" (whatever this means for the editor itself) digital edition. The dichotomy between "us" as philologists and "you" as computer scientists or whoever else is never fruitful as we all know.
However, it is necessary to acknowledge that digital philology as a discipline is not mature at all both in principles - as the debates at the conference stressed out - and in practices (where the discipline itself seems to enlarge and become a "transdiscipline"). Some talks though excelled in showing that this is not always true. Ambitions are high both in the development of new tools and in the contextualisation of the discipline in a specific theoretical framework.
- the attendance was very much over the organisers' expectations and most importantly, besides the big names in the field, featured a crowd of young people (undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as young researches from all over Italy and, in some cases, from other European countries).
Their subscriptions to the workshop exceeded the available seats. However, they didn't intervene at the open discussion itself. What does this mean? Would the debate been different if lead by a younger generation? Do they prefer doing rather than talking? Do they privilege the direct experience and then model the theory on it? Do they see less the discrepancies and more the challenges?
- the debate at the round table was passionate and stimulating.
Being all compressed in one afternoon, the discussion became rather abstract and intense, detached from the single presentations. Rather than concentrate on the single implementation and ideas, the juice of the substantial issues came out leaving the audience, or at least me, immobilised by the flood.
- even if dominated by the Italian language, the multilingual (and multicultural) aspect of the conference emerged during the presentations, the discussions and the social moments, reminding us of a wider challenge beyond the one of digital philology itself.
Another occasion for creating bounds and think of future collaborations.
Some of the materials related to the presentations are already available on the conference website.
All the best,
Arianna