From print to digital: an encoding model for the scholarly edition of Giorgio Bassani’s notes

Abstract

The notes Giorgio Bassani wrote on his books represent a privileged access to his workshop, allowing us to reconstruct the genesis of the works and the intellectual profile of an important 20th century writer. When it comes to publishing, however, they pose numerous problems of classification, representation and systematisation of the data, against which the digital tool proves to be extremely advantageous. This contribution reflects on this theme, presenting the prototype of a digital edition built on the case study of Bassani's annotations to La scuola dell’uomo by Guido Calogero (Firenze, Sansoni, 1939) and reasoning on the important potential of XML-TEI markup in the treatment and representation of a complex, structured and sometimes elusive textual object such as the note.