Preface

Many scientific ventures start from haphazard meetings and this is also true for the history of this volume. During an informal meeting, Philippe Baret, Caroline Macé, Barbara Bordalejo and Peter Robinson put forward the idea of organizing a workshop together; only a few months later what had first appeared to be a simple hypothesis became a real event, also made possible thanks to the collaboration of many people and to the financial support of the Unit of Genetics of the University of Louvain (Louvain-la- Neuve, Faculty of Bioengineering, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences). We need to thank people who morally supported our initiative from the very beginning: besides Peter Robinson and Barbara Bordalejo, we would like to thank Peter Van Deun and Bram Roosen (Instituut voor Vroegchristelijke en Byzantijnse studies, K. U. Leuven), Carlos Steel (De Wulf-Mansioncentrum, K. U. Leuven), Dirk Van Hulle (Antwerp James Joyce Centre, Universiteit Antwerpen) and Andrea Schmidt (Centre for the Study of Gregory of Nazianzus, U. C. L.). Above all, we wish to thank the people who helped us make this workshop not only a scientific achievement but also a pleasant moment of friendship and conviviality: Anne-Catherine Lantin, Steve Ferrière and Isabelle Caignet. We would not have been able to present the results of this international conference to the public without the support of the Institute for Computational Linguistics in Pisa. Although the conference was held in English, we did not want the publication to be exclusively in this language. Therefore, we are grateful to Richard Goulet, who could not participate in the workshop, but accepted to contribute to this volume. Richard Goulet, like Peter Robinson and Andrea Bozzi, is a pioneer in the use of the computer in philology. Finally, Laura Cignoni should be thanked for her precious contribution in all those cases in which it was necessary to perform translations from Italian into English and for the general editing of the text to be handed to the publisher in camera-ready format. ...