Digital Philology Research Articles

The dynamics of incompletion: multilingual manuscript genetics and digital philology

To examine the dynamics of incompletion that characterizes many writings by twentieth century authors, the following essay investigates the possibilities to visualize (1) switches, (2) shuffles and (3) shifts in modern multilingual manuscripts with digital philological tools. (1) Jerome McGann’s notions of the bibliographical and the linguistic codes were originally not coined in relation to manuscript studies, but they can be applied to a particular form of “code switching” between an image-based and a text-based approach. (2) Another phenomenon that typically marks the writing process of literary texts is the practice of shuffling textual segments when their definitive position has not yet been fixed. (3) Finally, transtextual shifts in multilingual manuscripts are not only limited to intertextual references, but often have a language-related dimension as well.