The Importance of Being... Object-Oriented: Old Means for New Perspectives in Digital Textual Scholarship

In this contribution we propose an Object-Oriented (OO) approach to the design and development of reusable tools for the domain of scholarly editing. It regards some software engineering considerations about the importance of being object- oriented in implementing software applications for digital textual scholarship. This work fits into an ongoing discussion about textual modelling (Pierazzo 2015) where the need for extensible, reusable and modular applications is constantly increasing (Driscoll and Pierazzo 2016). Although the digital turn of textual scholarship is nowadays a reality and many advancements have been made in encoding and visualizing textual resources, flexible and shared models in the construction of tools for scholarly editing are still missing (Almas and Beaulieu 2013; Shillingsburg 2015; Robinson and Bordalejo 2016). This lack typically leads to the development of ad hoc - i.e. not reusable - software (Ciotti 2014; Schmidt 2014). Exploiting our experience in projects we worked on (e.g. Giovannetti et al. 2016; Abrate et al. 2014; Bozzi 2013; Del Grosso et al. 2013), we have conceived a general OO model that will be introduced in the following section (Del Grosso et al. 2016; Boschetti and Del Grosso 2015).