კლასიკოსთა თხზულებების აკადემიური გამოცემა და თანამედროვე ტექნოლოგიები

აბსტრაქტი

სტატიიდან აღებული ავტორის ინგლისურენოვანი რეზიუმე:

Key words: Textual Criticism, Scholarly Edition, Digital Bases, New Technologies.

Rapid development of computer technologies is putting new challenges before textual scholars. Georgian digital bases get richer day by day and it becomes easier for those who work on scholarly editions of Georgian writers to get exhaustive information for their comments and annotations. World’s famous scientists say that future of scholarly editions is in digital format. There is a great number of computer programs that help them to work on manuscripts, variations, attribution etc. We should master all these tools and technologies to make our work more effective but before we are able to get some trainings and masterclasses from our foreign colleagues, we have worked out some simple technologies to help us in such tasks as e.g.

attribution, dating of the undated texts, preparation of the authentic text, commentary, annotation etc. Digital catalogues make it easier to compile bibliographical data. For the purpose of attribution we first used digital corpuses in 2006 when preparing the 11-th volume of Ilia Chavchavadze’s works. Attributing the editorials of the period when the magazine “Droeba” had two editors – Ilia Chavchavadze and Sergei Meskhi we created two digital corpuses of the writings of these authors and carried out comparative statistic analysis. The results showed that the anonymous editorials resembled Ilia Chavchavadze’s works in many aspects. In the archives of Georgian classic authors there are lots of anonymous manuscripts.

It would be very helpful if we had a digital manuscript album with the samples of handwritings belonging to the famous Georgian authors. It would make easier to compare the anonymous handwritings with the digital samples and identify the authors. Digital corpuses can be used for finding out relationship between two texts – revealing identical and similar elements. It is especially useful in the voluminous literary works – novels, stories, poems, dramas etc. As a result of the study we can say _ is the text a variant (or a reduction) of the other one or not. In the edition of Georgian writers’ epistolary heritage digital corpus of all private letters of the particular authors helped us to date more than 120 undated private letters.

Grigol Orbeliani’s 63 letters were omitted from the previous edition because the editors could not manage to date them. Only thanks to the modern technologies it became possible to date the letters and put them in the chronological order in the appropriate volumes. Sometimes writers use very specific words or neologisms created by themselves and editors classify them as proofs and correct them. Digital corpuses of the works of the authors may solve the problem. If the word or its specific form is repeated in different texts it is supposed that it is not a proof and should not be corrected. Scholarly editions have voluminous scientific apparatus containing historical comments.

Internet search engines make it much easier to obtain information about personal names, geographical names and historical events mentioned in the texts but it turned out to be more convenient to create special databases by compiling texts associated with the author in one digital corpus. Here we mean memoire, critical reviews, biographies, genealogies etc. It is much easier to extract information from such purpose oriented digital corpuses than from internet. Scholarly editions have alphabetical indices of personal names, geographical names, periodicals etc. the items of the indices are repeated from volume to volume. It is not necessary to write annotations separately for each of them.

We can make one digital base of annotated indices and use them for every volume. It saves much time and energy. In scholarly editions comments are added to the phrases that are difficult to understand for average readers, therefore they are rarely identical (as the commented phrases are not identical). Nevertheless, creation of the corpus of comments turned to be useful as well. Microsoft Word options make it easy to place items in alphabetic order. This engine is widely applied in the indices but it may also be used to avoid printing of one and the same text twice in the same edition. There are numerous cases of such mistakes. Some verses were printed twice in the same edition _ among dated and among undated ones, some verses have been printed twice with different titles, some have been printed in the section of translations and original ones.

Putting all the texts in alphabetic order makes it easy to notice similarities and gives us a chance to check are they identical or not. We started to provide scholarly editions with alphabetic indices, included all the variations of the titles into the alphabetic order and supplied with the information about the title with which the text is printed in the given scholarly edition. It is very helpful because most of the readers know the titles of some verses from popular editions and if not the index they would not be able to identify the title they know with the one, the verse is printed in the edition. It is obvious that digital era gives textual critics tremendous opportunities if they are creative enough to work out appropriate technologies of using them.

გამოქვეყნებულია ჟურნალში „სჯანი“, ტ. 15 (2014), გვ. 115–125. ნაშრომის გახსნა