Da Digital Variants a Ecdosis. Filologia digitale vingt ans après

This paper describes the birth, creation and latest developments of the Digital Variants (DV) archive, launched at the University of Edinburgh in 1996. DV was one of the first online experiments to explore the potential of the Web (interactivity, accessibility, etc.) for philological research and teaching, and for the study of the writing process. Since its inception, DV has experimented with a number of tools, languages and formats for the representation, analysis and display of literary texts existing in different versions. During twenty years of work, we have observed a gradual shift from a textual paradigm based on presentation through markup languages to the use of graphical interfaces to explore visual and material aspects of the writing process. To explore these new possibilities our group developed a system for encoding variant texts, the Multi-Version Document model, which evolved gradually into Ecdosis, a platform for preparing digital scholarly editions that can be easily and dynamically created, published and shared over the Web.