Special Issue # 6 (1.2022)

This article discusses some of the problems and solutions within the scope of Digital Philology raised by the edition of the Romanceiro – the first Iberian modern folk balladry collection – by the Portuguese writer Almeida Garrett (Oporto, 1799 – Lisbon, 1854). We analyse, throughout this study, in what extent it is appropriate to skip into a digital scholarship environment in order to fulfil our editorial requirements. Moreover, we examine methodological and workflow driven aspects we have been discussing alongside the Garrettonline project development, regarding the relationship between an archive and a scholarly edition.

›Distant reading‹ approaches to investigating literary genre are relatively new but flourishing. Not only are new methods being explored but it is also assumed that problems which have engaged literary studies for some time can be fruitfully tackled with these new methods. In this paper, we take a closer look at two influential studies that employ DH methods (›distant reading‹) on genre theory: Andrew Piper’s »Fictionality« (2016) and Ted Underwood’s »The Life Cycles of Genres« (2016). We scrutinize the objectives and results of these studies by asking the following questions: (1) What is the traditional research topic that is addressed, and what are the explanatory targets? (2) How are the explanatory targets addressed, and what results are generated? And finally, (3) do these studies really answer the traditional questions they (explicitly) set out to answer, and are they successful in doing so? In asking these questions, we hope to work out something more general about the potentials of DH methods when it comes to (traditional) genre theory.

The use of the computer in literary studies may be seen as a link between the two main intellectual traditions devoted to the study of literary texts: philology and close reading on the one hand, and literary theory on the other. However, forging this link is not easy. In this paper, we describe an experimental approach to computer-based literary research, based on a combination of several models and focusing on the discrepancies between them. The computer is fed with literary texts, processes them in various ways, then returns to the researcher a graphic product that points out where the models do not agree with one another, assuming that such places may be hermeneutically interesting for human scholars.

This article examines digital practices of literary (studies) communication in social media. Social media not only digitally transmit the offline offers of literary communication institutions. In fact, social media develop specific cultural practices of communication of, with, and about literature. Using the social network Twitter as an example, this article characterizes these digital practices of literary communication in social media and typologizes how literary studies and literature didactics implement these practices methodically and systematically in academic teaching. In conclusion, social media are becoming literarily and epistemically relevant networks for science communication.