Textual Philology Facing Liquid Modernity: Identifying Objects, Evaluating Methods, Exploiting Media

Aim of this conference is to explore a new perspective on philology in the 21st century, especially focusing on the value of philological expertise in the age of “post-truth” (named word of the year 2016 by the Oxford Dictionaries). The innovative purpose of the planned event is twofold. First, we will subject the intensively productive, but mostly theoretical/methodological self-reflection on philology of the last decades to the test of its planned achievements, namely the improvement of text-editing. Secondly, as the transmission of texts on the Internet often resembles the anonymity, lack of control, and easy falsification (in one word, “liquidity”) typical of textual transmission in the Middle Ages, we propose to challenge our methods in order to step forward a philological inquiry about “Web-texts”. In this perspective, we aim to reassess the centrality of a philological approach to the written world (including the Internet) in the Third Millennium.