Maison européenne des sciences de lhomme et de la société - Centre de Recherches sur les Civilisations et les Langues Etrangères

The CHispa project aims at creating tools in order to develop the digital exploration of Hispanic manuscripts. From the archives of the Spanish writer José Mora Guarnido (1894-1967) and the Uruguayan playwright Carlos Denis Molina (1916-1983), we aim at combining the action of preservation and protection of Hispanic manuscripts with critical-genetic studies and editorial action. The goal is to develop innovative sources for documenting international research on the movement of thought in the first half of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, the project opens many areas of training for students from areas traditionally distant from each other through a transdisciplinary team. CHispa is a programme turned towards Digital Humanities because it brings together, around a common purpose, researchers and professionals from different areas and components (Information, Communication and Computer Science, Web and Social Sciences) and towards digital dissemination of research and knowledge. The archives involved in the programme come from Uruguay and are currently in the care of the Service Commun de la Documentation of the Université Lille 3, where they are preserved by the research center CECILLE (EA-4074). These are the archives of two contemporary authors who wrote in a context of mobility and conflict (often caused by political constraints) and made important decisions in the context of significant events of the history of twentieth century. Their archives are relevant to the research and history of the movement of intellectuals from Europe and the Americas : these are sources that can help understand or reconsider the maps of exilic movements that have been caused by the principal conflicts during the twentieth century. These writers, who have also personally known each other (links can be established between the two funds), have left many manuscripts which we will analyze according to the analytical approach of genetic criticism as it is developed in the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (ITEM, UMR-8132) since the 1960s. Textual genetic analyzes writing processes by comparing the different stages of the development of a text. We have seen that genetic criticism does not exist in Spanish. The “Hispanic” approach in the study of manuscripts copies the “Italian” philology and does not include the notion of writing process; it compares the variants without interpreting phenomena in their chronology. The CHispa project will therefore contribute to establish a genetic and critical methodology in Spanish as well as a process to edit Hispanic manuscripts, but it will open new possibilities and/or modes for critical and genetic edition of multilingual manuscripts. At the end of this 36 month programme, we will have a website which will be also a collaborative platform for manuscripts editing, open to researchers and the public amateur, based on the TEI edition and adapted to Web 2.0 technologies. This innovative tool by its multidisciplinary and evolving approach , is called to be sustained and openED to other authors or themes.