Fixing the Movements of Thought in Text and Terminology: the Effectiveness of Scholarly Digital Tools on Saussure's Writings

The aim of this contribution is to present and discuss some recent activities, carried out by the Institute of Computational Linguistics (CNR - Pisa), devoted to representing in an explicit and formal way the diachronic evolution of concepts and terms occurring in Saussure's manuscripts. In the first part of the presentation, we will briefly outline some theoretical aspects concerning the diachronic standpoint in terminology and the "best practices" to be followed when modelling (diachronic) terminological resources. Then, some examples of terminological evolution will be provided, taken from the electronic lexicon Simple_FdS, built within the PRIN project "Per un'edizione digitale dei manoscritti di Ferdinand de Saussure" (2008-2011), based on the Generative Lexicon theory elaborated by Pustejovsky (1995). Terminological data will be shown in LexO, a Web-based and collaborative web editor, which allows for building lexical and terminoontological resources, compliant with the Semantic Web technologies (RDF and OWL). In the second part of the talk, starting from the outcomes of the aforementioned project, we will present the scholarly digital platform aimed at describing and analysing text resources. The encoding approach follows the current de facto standard in representing textual resources, namely the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines. In particular, we adopted the tag sets defined in the Module for Transcription of Primary Resources. An example will be illustrated on how describe and visualize the process of writing in Saussure's manuscripts. The example was implemented exploiting the Omega framework as well as the Edition Visualization Technology (EVT). In such a way, scholars have at their disposal a powerful tool for searching additions, deletions, substitutions, retracings, different hands, transpositions, marginal and interlinear notes, and all the other textual phenomena significant to understanding the "Movements of thought" which emerge in the handwritten pages.