ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Andrei Terian and Stefan Baghiu analyse some of the challenges of preserving literary heritage through digitisation. The study begins with a reflection on the ambiguous status of literary heritage as a set of verbal artefacts that is simultaneously claimed and rejected by both literary studies and cultural heritage studies. A review of the relevant bibliography leads to a three-part working definition, which is then employed throughout the rest of the chapter. The second part of the study focuses on the specific challenges of digitising texts that form part of literary heritage. The most significant of these is what the authors call “the analogue paradox” – that is, the tension faced by curators of literary databases between “archive” and “corpus,” between “quantitative” and “historical” literary heritage – in short, between preserving the original text and presenting it in a way that suits the needs and comprehension levels of contemporary readers. Finally, these theoretical considerations are complemented by a description of the authors' own experience in digitising literary heritage, as demonstrated by their work on curating the Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel – a corpus of approximately 1,300 Romanian novels covering the period 1845–1947.
