Encoding, Visualizing, and Generating Variation in Fernando Pessoa’s Livro do Desassossego

Abstract

One of the goals of the LdoD Digital Archive is to show Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet as a network of potential authorial intentions and a conjectural construction of its successive editors. Our digital representation of the dynamics of textual and bibliographical variation depends on both XML encoding of variation sites (deletions, additions, substitutions, etc.) and metatextual information concerning authorial and editorial witnesses (date, order, heteronym, etc.). While TEI-XML markup may be considered as a particular kind of critical apparatus on its own, it is through visualization tools and graphical interface that users will be able to engage critically with the dynamics of variation in authorial and editorial witnesses. Besides representation of textual and bibliographical variation in the work’s genetic and editorial history, the LdoD Digital Archive will enable readers to generate new virtual forms of the work, assuming the roles of editor and/or author. Our paper discusses the theoretical and technical aspects of the various strategies adopted for encoding, visualizing, and generating variation in the LdoD Digital Archive. These issues are discussed with the support of a prototype currently under development.