Reading novels in Einaudi: the case of Natalia Ginzburg. Reading opinions under the scrutiny of Digital Humanities.

Abstract

This paper presents the results of the modelling and analysis of the reading process within the Italian publishing house Einaudi after the Second World War, with a special focus on Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991). More specifically, the corpus of sources consists of the reading reports concerning contemporary narrative works, which represent a fundamental step in the decision-making process that leads to the publication of a work and therefore to the construction of the catalogue of a publishing house. The examination of Natalia Ginzburg’s reading reports, mostly unpublished, provides the basis for a critical reflection on her editorial activity, a reflection which is rooted in the belief that editorial writing represents a complex critical genre that deserves to be investigated by specific methods.

The tools (in the present case UML, PostgreSQL, XML TEI) and methods of the Digital Humanities have made a major contribution to the realisation of the scientific objectives of the research work. On the one hand, they have made it possible to model, represent and interrogate the corpus of documents in a relevant and efficient way; on the other hand, they were fundamental and indispensable from a methodological, heuristic and interpretative point of view.