Osvaldo Manuel Silvestre (Coimbra University, Portugal)

Constructing a digital archive of Fernando Pessoa’s Livro do Desassossego [LdoD]: an impossible project?

The three main objectives of the research project ‘No Problem Has Solution: A Digital Archive of the Book of Disquiet’ are: (1) to represent the dynamics of the acts of writing and editing in the production of the LdoD; (2) to explore the potential of the digital medium to simulate the history of this dynamics; and (3) to create a space for virtualizing the LdoD capable of fostering new dynamics of reading, editing, and researching in the encounter between readers and its material corpus of written fragments.

This presentation will describe the project’s rationale and discuss its place and impact on the ongoing history of digital scholarship in the humanities, focusing also on the contribution of new media to conceptualize the idea and materiality of the book (and particularly the idea and materiality of this kind of modernist book).