Digital Text : Conceptual and Methodological Frontiers

0. Introduction The upsurge of text circulation in the electronic environment has been attracting the attention of various fields of investigation in recent years. Historians have observed the role of digital texts in transforming the cultural practice of writing and reading; the cognitive sciences have investigated digital formats as knowledge representation models; literary studies have interrogated digital writing as a genre1. A less populated debate on the “digital revolution” is their place in the history of the technology of language processing in written form, a sphere of investigation traditionally in charge of philology, linguistics, and textual studies. It could be said that in this regard, ‘Digital Text’ is an object in wait for conceptual and methodological exploration. This paper investigates some routes in this direction. We shall examine digital texts from a strictly material perspective, examining their characteristics as artifacts and the functionings of their diffusion (that is: of the transmission chain from producing to receiving them), and endeavor to understand their significance in the material transformation of written language production. We shall argue that digital text, rather than an incremental point in the evolution of text-production techniques, is a watershed in the history of text diffusion. In digital text production, an unprecedented stage is introduced into the chain of information processing: the mediation of codification by mathematical programming. This singles out digital text as an entirely novel form of written language. As such, it claims a central place as an object of study; and at the same time, it constitutes a break-