From codex to apps: the medieval manuscript in the age of its digital reproduction

Scholarly digital edition (DSE) projects of the last few years have enhanced the role of the digital facsimile as a standard and necessary part of the edition. This is the result of a well-known discussion, which started with the questioning of traditional editorial theory and practice and led to the need to reassess the material and historical dimension of texts. In the meantime, big GLAMs’ digitization projects produced a proliferation of primary sources and the first attempts to exploit the digital facsimile in DSEs saw daylight. Manuscript surrogates can be integrated in different ways in edition projects: often handled as merely ‘accessory’ materials, they generally function as ‘additional’, i.e. enriching, components of the DSEs. Although most editions are still text-centred, in few but very remarkable cases digital images can become a truly ‘constitutive’ part of a project. This happens thanks to standardization efforts (TEI, IIIF) resulting in new forms of editing that revolve around the potentiality of digital manuscripts: paradoxically, the more immaterial the edition becomes, the more it seems to be able to focus on the material quality of texts. This article seeks to investigate the reasons and purposes of the material shift by providing a series of examples from edition projects.