International/global networking against the backdrop of nondigital and digital editorial ventures

The article explores some of the continuities and discontinuities that mark the ongoing change in international editorial ventures from a nondigital to a digital framework. Placing collaboration at the centre of the editorial work, it is assumed that reading is the minimal act of collaboration which lies at the basis of the one-language/one-literature model, i.e., the national philology paradigm. Such a paradigm appealed to international cooperation in a number of ways (archives, journals, publishing houses, etc.), but it also came to promote the idea of trans-national abstract goals (e.g., in Lachmann’s ideal of recension without interpretation or in Gaston Paris’s utopian cité des sciences). These goals favoured the progressive establishment of the digital paradigm, which in turn encouraged (or facilitated) a change of direction, from the study of in situ textual specificities to taxonomies aiming at a representation of the general structure of texts. Against the backdrop of the new paradigm, international collaboration has been intensified, but, it is argued, the new medium does not take the place of the old medium, rather interacts with it. In the end, the article touches upon some of the challenges faced by digital initiatives, namely regarding sustainability and political issues.