DHCommons

Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) is one of Italy’s most acclaimed poets and intellectuals, whose interpretation of the crisis of modernity gained him recognition already among his 19th century contemporaries Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, but it was not until the publication of his intellectual diary, the Zibaldone, at the turn of the 20th century that Leopardi’s thought began to reveal its depths and to gather due critical attention. In its fragmentary style, the voluminous manuscript (comprised of close to a million words and spanning various topics, such as philology, aesthetics, social mores, politics, metaphysics, etc.), exemplifies in spirit and practice the unfinished projects of Romanticism, yet it is equally propelled by the Enlightenment’s methodological production of knowledge, as Leopardi furnished it with a detailed thematic Index at the paragraph level to serve its organization in treatises, a Philosophical Encyclopedia, a Handbook, etc. The present project of digitally encoding the text aims to exploit this dialectical structure of the text and allow researchers to strip on demand even further the fragmentary sequence by evidencing authorial encoding often lost in print editions, such as marginal and interlinear comments and semantic underlining, and on the other hand, to rearrange the fragments in semantic clusters by activating the virtual hyper-links (i.e., the internal references) that the author created throughout the text while composing and re-reading it and those in the Index. The main ideological motivation behind this endeavor is to evaluate and distinguish the fragmentariness that is the expression of genuine relativist thought and fragmentariness that is due to the physical nature of the media for recording thought. With the objective of mining the depths and facilitating comprehensive grasp of the text, the research platform will allow users to browse the manuscript, following its links and evidencing or suppressing its annotation features; to save and export author- and user- generated pathways and to visualize their semantic maps; to work with versions of the text rearranged according to the hierarchy of its links; to visualize the chronological structure of composition of the fragments. A future expansion of the project will provide links to all of the external bibliographical references Leopardi makes in the Zibaldone, thereby recreating its ideological matrices.