Another great paper at the Brown conference was by Domenico Fiormonte on “Textual genesis and the writing process: The Magrelli Genetic Machine”. After giving us a background on philology and textual criticism in Italy, he showed a Flash variant machine that allows one to see manuscript and text interact. Domenico led the development of the Digital Variants site at the University of Edinburgh which has information about tools, theory, texts, and projects.
Domenico quoted some key contributors to modern Italian philology.
Contini: the literary work as a ìendless approximation to a [fixed] valueî
Segre: ìthe nature of the text is shaped by the modes of its production and reproduction (Ö) in conclusion the text it is not a physical entity, but an unreachable limit [concetto limite]î
Fiormonte does genetic criticism that looks at the composition process (the writing process) and the psychology of composition.
In conversation with him he felt that an interactive authoring environment like Flash allows him to better explore the genesis of a work than a markup model.