Variants and Versioning between Textual Bibliography and Computer Science

Some challenging question arise today on the relations between textual bibliography and computer science: can philologists and computer scientists collaborate not only for encoding variants in digital form – Critical Editions – but also for interpreting these variants from a qualitative and quantitative point of view? Which are the potentialities of a critical approach to the textual bibliography, supported by versioning categories and tools? And in general, are the studies of text variants fated to disappear or will computer science be able to provide new methods and tools to investigate the origins and evolutions of a text? In this paper we address some of these research questions by presenting a fruitful collaboration over a qualitative analysis of the variants of the first chapter of “I Promessi Sposi” by Alessandro Manzoni. PhiloEditor, a web tool for displaying and annotating text variants, successfully supported such analysis and introduced a new methodology that has been already successfully applied to the legal domain.