New cultural writing practices, new perspectives of Textual Criticism: towards HyperEditing

Abstract

The advent of computer technology and its developments in the second half of the twentieth century was responsible for a new paradigm for the writing culture, enabling, for the first time, the existence of the text outside a physical surface. It is, therefore, a new condition of texts which has changed the cultural practices, production, circulation and appropriation of the text (Chartier, 2001). Philology is not oblivious to this new socio-cultural context and philologists have taken advantage of the potentialities that information technology and digital media provide for the editing of texts, especially of those that have been written and disseminated within the manuscript and/or printed culture. Jerome McGann (1997) used the term HyperEditing to name the editing that philologists are producing in digital media. This type of editing is a hypermedia which makes it possible to put image, sound and movement together in a same space, and other specific characteristics of computer language. In this article, I intend to discuss how textual criticism is being adapted to this paradigm shift through new editing models. This study is part of the theoretical and methodological framework developed for the pamphlets hyperediting of Eulalio Motta, www.eulaliliomotta.com.br (Barreiros, 2013).