A collaborative tool for philological research: experiments on Ferdinand de Saussure's manuscripts

The present paper describes a philological-computational tool developed by the Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale (ilc - cnr) of Pisa, aimed at creating a digital edition of Ferdinand de Saussure's unpublished manuscripts. Since the use of a digital edition and of the most modern computer technology allows a more in-depth research, the ilc is developing a set of digital tools in order to take ad- vantage of both the documents and the related information added by the scientific community. The integration exploits the Java enterprise platform by organizing the different features in modules. Thus, the tool meets the following requirements: (i) converting legacy digital resources into valid Xml documents (tei compliant); (ii) parallel visualization among imported texts and related images; (iii) search and in- dexing; (iv) handling of variant readings; and (v) collaborative annotation.