Modelling The Editorial Reading Process: The Case Of Giulio Einaudi Editore

The paper will present the results of the analysis and the modelling of the reading process within the Italian publishing house Einaudi (Mangoni, 1999; Turi, 1990) in the aftermath of World War II. The research focuses on the activity of one of the most important contemporary Italian publishers and, ultimately, on the dissemination of Italian literature of the last century. This is part of a larger project, which focuses on narrative works and on Natalia Ginzburg (Iannuzzi, 2012; Saita, 2009), one of the leading collaborators of the publishing house and one of the most original writers of the period.
Reading processes were carried out within the publishing house or thanks to external consultants, and had the purpose of verifying the economic and literary viability of a work; this activity resulted in the production of reading reports, containing a summary and an evaluation of the proposed work. Through these documents, mostly unpublished (a small selection is included in Munari, 2015), the books to be printed were selected. Reading reports embodied therefore cultural models that need to be interpreted according to a specific historical and cultural context.
The presentation will highlight the fundamental contribution of tools and methods of Digital Humanities in the context of my research. More specifically, I will discuss data modelling and encoding as speculative activities of epistemological value (Cummings, 2008; Ciula and Eide 2014; Flanders and Jannidis, 2018). In fact, by modelling the reading process, I was able to understand and represent its complexity; in addition, by encoding the documents I was able to focus in a consistent and speculative matter on aspects such as textuality, style, rhetoric, highlighting differences of the communicative process. The potential of the DH tools and methods have yet to be exploited and applied to this research field: at present there are no digital editions of reading reports. This lack of direct reference models is one of the most stimulating challenges of my project.
The model was created thanks to a class diagram developed in UML (fig.1). This allowed me, on the one hand, to organize a heterogeneous corpus, and on the other hand it provided the basis for the conceptualization and analysis activities necessary to the creation of a relational database. The database allows to efficiently account for sources, gathering the fundamental information for the description of the corpus in a structured way. It currently contains metadata of a sample of documents, which were then transcribed and encoded according to the TEI XML schema. The metadata in the database and the encoded texts form the basis of the work that will follow: the creation of a digital edition of the documents themselves.
To describe the UML scheme (fig. 1), I focus my attention first on the document (
documento), which is stored in a particular archive (
archivio). UML calls their entities classes, where each class can have attributes that describe a series of their characteristics: the class
documento, for example, contains the “date”, “length”, “type of writing” and “form” fields. Each
documento conveys what I have called an editorial text (
testo editoriale). It was fundamental to make the distinction between documentary unit and textual unit, considering also the fact that the same editorial text can be transmitted by several documents: often, in fact, many copies were made of the same reading report, in order to reach different collaborators who were called upon to express their opinion within a collective decision-making process.

Editorial reports (
parere editoriale) are transmitted by different types of editorial texts, among them, of particular interest are minutes (
verbale) of editorial meetings (Einaudi, 2001; Munari, 2011) which report upon the opinions and the sometimes heated exchanges between the various collaborators; these documents allows us to reconstruct the collegial decision-making process, although this reconstruction is, of course, only partial, since it summaries on a much denser oral communication. Other textual typologies that I have identified are:

• Editorial department decisions in which the opinions of the individual collaborators were reported indirectly by the document's compiler (
comunicazione di segreteria/redazione).

• Structured reading reports (
scheda).

• Letters by the individual collaborators, which are the emblem of the dialogic and collegial character of the decision-making process within the publishing house (
lettera).

I distinguish between editorial texts and the editorial reports because a single editorial report doesn’t occupy the entirety of any given editorial texts (except in the rare cases of structured reports), and sometimes, many editorial reports are contained by a single editorial text.
The editorial reader (
lettore) had different natures (external or internal collaborators; if internal: collection directors, editorial director, and so on). It is not always easy to identify the reviewer: the documents can be signed or unsigned, sometimes containing an identifier of a given collaborator, but when completely anonymous, an analysis of the handwriting is required (if possible). It is important to underline that, as shown in the diagram, the editorial reader who expresses an editorial opinion may not coincide with the compiler of the document containing it. This is evident in the case of the minutes, where the writer is often a stenographer.

The model I have produced is essential for the re-organization of the corpus and for the rationalization of the reading process. This model is a preparatory work for the study of the corpus itself, which ultimate aim is the valorization of a literary micro-genre (Bricchi, 2010) that deserves to be studied through appropriate tools. The model itself will allow to understand the reasons behind the decisions and the relative weight of any given collaborator, providing an insight on how the Italian literary canon of the aftermath of World War II was built.

FIG. 1

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