Digital Variants
Digital Variants is a digital archive project of contemporary authors created in 1996 by Domenico Fiormonte and supported by the Italian Section at the University of Edinburgh.
On the DV site a number of variant texts, autographs and drafts of Italian and Spanish authors are available and may be consulted with the help of different visualisation tools. The main objective of DV is not preservation, but the provision of a user-friendly access to these original materials for both teaching and research purposes.
Digitisation of writers’ drafts and pre-texts
DV was first conceived in 1991 in response to a relatively new issue relating to the contemporary literary writing process: as the manuscript writing space fades away, replaced by electronic processes, we face the inevitable disappearance of variants. Fewer writers save the various electronic versions of their texts, and the new writing technology implies a loss of the knowledge of the genèse du texte. DV aims to provide a useful tool for the understanding of the literary writing process through the digitisation of writers’ drafts and pre-texts in both text and image formats. Well-known writers from Italy and Spain agreed to provide the DV archive with various electronic versions of their works.
At present the archive contains about 100 web documents by nine authors:
- Vincenzo Cerami
- Angel García Galiano
- Valerio Magrelli
- José Antonio Millán
- Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
- Francesca Sanvitale
- Fernando Savater
- Francisco Solano
- Roberto Vacca