A commonplace definition of a research design is that of ‘a strategy for answering research questions’. If we look at this definition closely, we find out it does not always apply to the initial stages of a research undertaking. The term strategy originates from warfare; it designates “a plan, scheme, or course of action designed to achieve a particular objective, especially a long-term or overall aim” (OED, entry strategy, n.). A strategy implies clarity on the level of intended outcomes, methods to achieve them, and involved variables; it is grounded in a leader’s ability to forecast events. However, design, both on the level of theory and practice, conceives also of unknown variables, unpredictability, serendipity, and the involvement of subconscious states of mind as its fundamentals along with known and predictable variables. The design process embraces all of these elements within a balance between thinking and making. As a consequence, the research question that initially triggered the whole design process may evolve strongly from its original formulation to adapt to the growing awareness about the actual features of the issues at stake.
Given these premises, the initial steps of Textus invisibilis in the years between 2010 and 2013 may be better understood if considered as parts of a tactic rather than a strategy. I was not even guided by a research question. My enquiry was didactical: “Will I be able to find some parchment manuscripts from the Middle Ages at the State Archive in Urbino so that I can organize a palaeographical training for my students there?” The starting point for the project was my surprise in finding more or less two thousand manuscript fragments with texts in different languages, with different scripts, and of various ages, mostly still sticking to their host object, as testimonies to a recycling practice that was totally new to me. Apart from a dozen liturgical fragments with musical notation, none of them had been described to those years. They were still unknown to the scholarly community. Through the year 2010, the question guiding my exploration of the depositories of the State Archive was “What is this recycling practice at all?”. My enquiry was formulated too broadly and vaguely to be approached as a research question. Furthermore, my philological background did not give me the knowledge required to tackle it. Therefore, I first approached the fragments with the means provided by my philological mindset: I focused on their textual contents, leaving the question of recycling later in my investigations. At the end of 2010, I submitted to the then Director of the State Archive of Pesaro-Urbino, Antonello de Berardinis, a project aimed at describing the fragments, identifying groups of fragments resulting from fragmentation of the same manuscript unit, databasing all of them after the virtual restoration of the damaged ones, and publishing the digital editions of some of them.
The initial mindset: a philological view on fragments
In a philological endeavour, the ultimate value of a fragment – whether of papyrus, parchment, paper, or else – lies in its textual content: specifically, in its place within the textual tradition (so-called stemma codicum) of an authorial or anonymous written work. The fact that its material support has been broken at some point in its existence is considered an unhappy accident that does not require a specific epistemology for approaching the new textual boundaries: in a ‘traditional’ philologist’s eyes, a fragmented text is – part pro toto – just a part of a text whose wholeness has to be reconstructed by gathering up and reassembling its scattered portions. With this ‘traditional’ philological tenet in mind, I first turned my attention to a group of ca. 300 fragments that had been detached from their host objects in the Nineties and were being kept in paper boxes in the reading room of the State Archive, waiting to be organized. When finding a huge amount of scattered textual evidence, a main philological research question is: “How can I organize this material so that its textual contents can be available to the scholarly community for their research aims?” This overall question implies several sub-questions. One of them is: “Should I organize the material so that only (or mainly) philologists can benefit from it, or shall I respect the needs of a wider user audience from the very start?” I established that making their textual contents accessible should be the guiding aim and that the textual data should be organized to serve the needs of any scholar interested in textual issues – not only philologists. Therefore, a database should be the main output rather than a series of ‘selected’ digital critical editions. Looking back, this was the earliest decision that would lead me far away from a mono-disciplinary approach to fragments towards an interdisciplinary one.
References
(May 26, 2024; to be continued)