Variants Mining. Computational investigations on authorial variants: a comparison between Leopardi and Manzoni

Abstract

What is the meaning of the authors’ interventions on their own texts? Variants Mining aims to answer this question by gaining empirical insight into creative thinking. The research focuses on pre-established categories of authorial variants to provide scholars with statistics of corrections, automatically computed starting from either the PDF document or the TEI encoding of the referring critical edition of the text. Finally, the output is made easily understandable thanks to a specifically tailored data visualization tool. This innovative comparative analysis on the correction modalities would allow to provide new philological readings that shed light on the creative process of different authors and assess if these interventions can be read as recurring patterns. Therefore, this methodology promotes a more conscious insight on the historical evolution of the authorial thought through a straightforward representation. A pilot analysis will focus on the case studies of Giacomo Leopardi’s Canti and Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi to understand the difference not only between the two key authors of Italian Romanticism, but also between poetry and prose.