Memory and loss: digital tools and the writing of history. A few considerations

It has become almost a truism to state that digital tools constitute a ground- breaking innovation in the methods of textual analysis as well as a great impro- vement in terms of circulation of knowledge and therefore also preservation of memory. It is unquestionable that the sheer wealth of data available for analysis thanks to digital publication has widened very significantly the corpus of texts known to scholars and currently available for linguistic and philological analysis. Whether such wealth of data can become part of an historical narration and what kind of narration it might be, however, is a rather different matter, both because of issues relating to the sustainability – technical and economical – of the digital means through which such knowledge circulates and is preserved, and because of the kind of enquiry that digital publication allows. We have come to consider that a series of events, facts or documents, are part of a history only when such series belongs to a recognizable context, reveals a pattern and therefore constitutes a narration, or better, a narrative. What kind of narrative is currently being written, to what extent is it determined by the delusion of omniscience fostered by our perception of virtual archives and libraries, and what facts emerge or indeed remain hidden or lost?