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This thesis is interdisciplinary in its methodology, sources and final delivery. The first part sets out the theoretical background, exploring the relationships between technology and literary artefacts. This section owes a great debt of theory to both textual criticism and the various schools of writing science (psychology, anthropology, linguistics, history of communication). Working from different perspectives, scholars such as Gianfranco Contini and G.R. Cardona have unfolded the cognitive and epistemological relevance of writers’ artefacts: variant texts, writing sketches, autographs, brouillons d’écriture, et. The different stages of writing can help us to reconstruct the original path that leads an author to a final text. Cognitive processes of the kind analysed in current research literature are naturally exhibited in the sequence of material produced by writers in their work. It we digitise these documents, and make them available through an electronic network (i.e. the World Wide Web), everybody will have the opportunity to observe the “writing kitchen” and learn how authors work. The second part of the thesis describes the history, methodology and content of the online digital archive developed by Edinburgh University Italian Department for the purpose of studying and teaching the writing process. The archive and web site (www.selc.ed.ac.uk/italian/digitialvariants), which are regularly enriched and updated, at present hold original texts and multimedia documents by and on Vincenzo Cerami, Francesa Sanvitale, Roberto Vacca, Angel Garcia Galiano, Francisco Solano, and Fernando Savater. The aims of the electronic project are: a) to create a literary hypermedia archive accessible to everyone via the Internet; b) to investigate the methodological possibilities of the Web for producing critical editions of modern and contemporary authors: c) to collect, analyse and publish information on the writing process; d) to take advantage of these materials in teaching Italian as a second language. This last possibility was explored in the Italian Department, where in 1997 we organised an introductory course in textual analysis using some of the variants, requiring the students to use the resources available online. The results were encouraging: I believe that Web teaching environments, especially if reinforced with appropriate computer-training sessions for students, can open new practical and theoretical scenarios in the field of second language writing acquisition. |
