Digital Humanities in the Virtual National Library

Abstract

A virtual national library can be distributed among people in arbitrary number of copies. Duplication is the only way of long-term preservation since the last millenials have shown that the durability of text carriers seems to have decreased as the number of copies have grown. Another condition of long-term preservation is that people also use the national cultural heritage to which they have access. This can be facilitated by providing narratives (such as literary history), not solely texts.“Digital philology” follows the classification principles of traditional philology when registering, editing the works and contextualizing them in a narrative. The first milestones of Hungarian digital philology: the repertory of the early modern Hungarian poetry: 1994, the first online critical edition: 1998, the first online Hungarian literary history: 2006. In recent years digital humanities scholars have highlighted hitherto unknown correlations and patterns in literary history thanks to these novel digital editions as well. These correlations are sometimes relevant, sometimes not. My book A vers (The Verse, 1991) foresaw the possibility of a “non-reading” philologist who uses Franco Moretti’s distant reading method.