Daejeon, July 27–31
Commenting on a literary text in digital form raises fundamental critical questions concerning the remediation of an ancient scholarly practice. From a historical perspective, this practice can be traced back at least to the transition from the volumen to the codex, a media shift that profoundly reconfigured the interaction between readers and texts. As scholars such as Walter Ong have shown, changes in material support are never neutral: they reshape cognitive habits, interpretive gestures, and the social organization of knowledge (Ong 1982).
Within print culture, commentary developed under the constraints imposed by the physical limits of the book. These constraints fostered a rigorous economy of selection: annotations were necessarily finite, hierarchically organized, and subordinated to the authorial text. In this sense, commentary functioned as an ancillary textuality – ancilla textus – designed to orient the reader and to mediate access to meaning, as theorized by scholars such as Cesare Segre (1993: 263). The commentary’s task was not to exhaust interpretation but to guide it.
The digital turn introduces a radically different scenario. The virtual space of the infosphere calls into question the very principle of selective limitation. From a technical point of view, annotations, links, references, and multimedia resources can proliferate without apparent bounds, destabilizing the traditional relationship between text and paratext. The digital scholarly edition thus faces a structural tension: while it enables unprecedented richness, it risks transforming commentary into an undifferentiated accumulation of information (Sahle 2016; Pierazzo 2015).
This tension leads to a fundamental question that directly concerns engagement: for whom is an “infinite” commentary written? One possible answer assumes a reader who scrapes an enriched text as one trawls the ocean with a net, extracting data and discarding the rest (Rasmussen 2016: 119-122). In this scenario, the text becomes a repository, and the reader is effectively a machine. This approach – common in data-driven humanities – is both legitimate and productive.
However, if we consider engagement not merely as interaction or access, but as a qualitative interpretive experience, another horizon opens up. What if the digital environment could be used to enhance reading as a fully human, situated, and historically conscious act? If so, the problem shifts. Given an abundance of archival, bibliographical, linguistic, and multimedia resources, the central challenge is no longer technical integration but the redefinition of commentary itself: its function, its rhetoric, and its orientation toward different kinds of readers.
In this sense, the engagement question raised by DH2026 cannot be reduced to usability or interface design alone. It concerns the cognitive and hermeneutic conditions under which readers encounter texts in digital environments.
Our response to this challenge is what we call Hyperedition: a dynamic, layered editorial model that seeks to balance the recovery of commentary’s traditional orienting function with the affordances of digital abundance. Hyperedition is conceived as an open-access, integrated scholarly edition in which the text occupies the center of a broader knowledge site – a digital ecosystem that synthesizes philology and lexicography, hermeneutics and pedagogy, scholarly rigor and reader accessibility (D'Agata et al. 2022: 263-265).
Rather than merely transferring the printed book to the screen, Hyperedition designs multiple, coherent reading experiences. Engagement is thus understood as participation in meaning-making, enabled through editorial choices that structure access to complexity rather than eliminating it.
Projects such as Pirandello Nazionale, Verismo Digitale, and Paves-e exemplify this approach at different stages of development and with distinct technical solutions. Together, they articulate a shared theoretical framework while offering concrete implementations of engagement-oriented scholarly editing. All three initiatives involve the authors of this paper through the Department of Humanities at the University of Catania, Italy, and its Centro di Informatica Umanistica (CINUM, directed by Antonio Di Silvestro), whose history dates back to the 1980s, when Giuseppe Savoca developed a pioneering method for the lexicographic processing of literary texts in IBM environments. This work produced both literary concordances and the Vocabolario della poesia italiana del Novecento (Savoca 1995; see also Savoca 2000 for the methodological framework). Over the years, Savoca's students have pursued different lines of research within the fields of literary studies and digital humanities. Among them, Antonio Sichera has provided the philosophical and hermeneutic foundations of the Hyperedition model discussed here (Sichera 2019).
Pirandello Nazionale, the earliest of the three projects, originated as a digital scholarly edition and – under the scientific direction of Antonio Sichera and Antonio Di Silvestro – gradually evolved into an integrated environment for reading, interpretation, and teaching (Edizione Nazionale dell'Opera Omnia di Luigi Pirandello 2018-2026; cfr. Subialka 2019; Di Silvestro / Sichera 2021; Giuffrida et al. 2024). Alongside critically established texts, the platform offers linguistic tools, philological notes, critical essays, and didactic materials directly anchored in textual passages. Engagement here takes the form of progressive mediation: readers are guided through increasing levels of interpretive complexity, enabling scholars, students, and general readers to navigate the corpus according to their competencies and interests.
Figure {1} Pirandello Nazionale: hyperedition of Luigi Pirandello's Enrico IV – text on the left, multimedia resources on the right.
Verismo Digitale (Verismo Digitale 2026, P.I. Marina Paino; cfr. Di Silvestro et al. 2022; Barbarino et al. 2024) pushes this principle further by making engagement a structural feature of editorial design. The project is conceived as a modular and customizable environment in which readers can actively select their depth of engagement. Its defining feature is the systematic integration of philological analysis and concordance-based reading. Readers can move fluidly from textual variants to linguistic patterns, from lexical recurrences to thematic structures. Concordances are not ancillary tools but central devices that invite exploratory reading and hypothesis formation (cfr. Barbarino 2025: 21-24). In this model, engagement emerges through the active transformation of linguistic data into interpretive insight.
Figure {2} Verismo Digitale: hyperedition of Giovanni Verga's I Malavoglia – text on the left, full-screen expandable commentary on the right, with built-in lexical references at the bottom.
Paves-e (PAVES-e 2026, P.I. Antonio Sichera; cfr. D'Agata et al. 2024) represents a technologically advanced instantiation of Hyperedition. Built upon a formal ontology that encodes texts, variants, and critical apparatuses, the project provides a robust infrastructure for computational analysis. At the same time, its diplomatic digital edition translates the highly formalized language of textual criticism into an intuitive reading experience. Engagement is achieved by enabling readers to confront textual materiality and editorial decision-making without requiring prior expertise in markup or formal models.
Figure {3} Paves-e: the portal homepage (left) and the diplomatic edition of a poem from Lavorare stanca by Cesare Pavese alongside the original manuscript (right).
Across these projects, Hyperedition functions as a mediating framework that reconciles scholarly depth with reader-oriented design.
To address the methodological questions posed by the infosphere, we turn to a long-standing hermeneutic tradition that has consistently reflected on the conditions of understanding. Our reference framework here draws on a philosophical reformulation of Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutics – and particularly of his notion of subtilitas, the refined attentiveness required by every act of interpretation – first developed in earlier work (Sichera 2001) and later recast as the operative principle of an engaged practice of reading (Sichera 2019: 39-52, 87-104).
Gadamer distinguishes three closely intertwined dimensions: subtilitas intelligendi (understanding), subtilitas explicandi (explanation), and subtilitas applicandi (application). Romantic hermeneutics already recognized the unity of understanding and explanation, insisting that comprehension cannot occur without explication. Understanding, however, is not a method but an event – one that presupposes participation in an ongoing historical process of transmission (Gadamer 1960: 290-295).
This insight has direct implications for engagement. If understanding is historically situated and application-oriented, then reading is not passive reception but an active process of relating the text to the interpreter’s present horizon.
Hyperedition provides the technical and conceptual framework for making this hermeneutic process explicit in digital form. By structuring access to explanation and enabling application, it transforms scholarly commentary into a dynamic historical event. Reading becomes a practice of attentive gathering, both individual and collective, cognitive and social – and thus, in a broader sense, political.
The editorial architectures of the three projects illustrate how engagement can be designed hermeneutically.
In Pirandello Nazionale, subtilitas intelligendi is supported by linguistic aids and contextual resources; subtilitas explicandi takes shape in critical commentaries and interpretive essays; subtilitas applicandi emerges through pedagogical activities that invite readers to reinterpret Pirandello’s texts in contemporary educational contexts.
In Paves-e, explanation is embedded in the formal structure of the ontology and the critical apparatus, while application is realized through the diplomatic edition, which allows readers to experience textual instability and editorial mediation firsthand.
In Verismo Digitale, the interaction between philology and concordance-based reading lies at the heart of applicatio. By exploring lexical and syntactic patterns across texts and variants, readers actively construct interpretive paths. Engagement here is not simulated participation but genuine interpretive labor, supported by digital tools.
Hyperedition ultimately redefines commentary as an economy of attention and relevance. Against the risk of informational overload inherent in the infosphere (cfr. Pierazzo 2015; Sahle 2016), it proposes an editorial ethics grounded in selection, orientation, and responsibility toward the reader.
In dialogue with the DH2026 call, this proposal argues that digital scholarly editions can function as spaces of critical engagement, where readers are invited not merely to navigate texts but to participate in the interpretive processes of understanding, explanation, and application that define humanistic inquiry in the digital age.
Edizione Nazionale dell'Opera Omnia di Luigi Pirandello. Edizione digitale (2018-2026). https://www.pirandellonazionale.it [05.05.2026].
PAVES-e (2026). https://paves-e.it [05.05.2026].
Verismo Digitale (2026). https://verismodigitale.unict.it [05.05.2026].