Leopardi: Wiki Leopardi, Leopardi Ecdosys, Leopardi 3D

Abstract

The digital projects presented in this report, related to Leopardi’s works, show how the digital medium provides different paradigms depending on the philological cases addressed, and that – as in paper philology – there is no ‘perfect’ edition. The model adopted for the representation of the printed tradition of the Canti – Wiki Leopardi – was developed in an educational context, and constitutes the experimentation of a collaborative edition with a high degree of specialization of the participants. The edition, which since its opening to the public in April 2020 has had more than 6,000 contacts, has a generalist and didactic vocation and makes it possible to combine the evolution of the structure of the book with that of the individual variants. On the other hand, the Leopardi Ecdosys project adopts a stratigraphic representation using the ‘graph’ method, which is very well suited to the case study used: the Neapolitan notebook of the Idylls, in which the ‘days’ of copying and the four correction campaigns can be effectively represented in the multiplicity of their correction layers. The last project presented, Leopardi 3D, which is still in progress, applies RTI (Reflectance Transformation Imaging) technology to the same Neapolitan notebook. Through a series of high-definition photos, taken with grazing light and reflections on a convex surface, it is possible, after post-imaging recomposition, to represent the three-dimensionality of the manuscript and highlight its compositional stratigraphy, in a truly ‘immersive journey’ through the manuscript, no longer considered as a two-dimensional object, but three-dimensional, where the third dimension is that of time.