A forensic philology for born-digital literary heritage

BLADE addresses one of the most urgent challenges for contemporary literary and archival studies — the preservation, analysis, and interpretation of born-digital materials. The project treats each digital file as a strand of textual DNA, composed of hexadecimal "bases" whose ordered succession forms the structure of the work, and adopts the methodological tools of digital forensics — bitstream imaging, metadata extraction, file carving, hex analysis, environmental emulation — as instruments of literary interpretation.

BLADE — Born-digital Literary Archives DNA Exploration — PI: Emmanuela Carbé.

Methodology

A reproducible workflow that adapts forensic procedures to philological inquiry: from imaging to emulation, from metadata to hexadecimal sequences.

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Case studies

The Franco Fortini archive (Siena) as the pilot.

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Journal

The project's cahier de laboratoire, with interpretive commentary.

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Network

BLADE is a Ca' Foscari SPIN project of the VeDPH (Ca' Foscari), in collaboration with EUTOPIA DigIn, Bit Philology (Universität Bern), and ALDiNa (AIUCD / CLARIN-IT).

A note on this site
The BLADE site is in active build. The homepage and basic project description are live; the other sections — methodology, case studies, journal, outputs — are scheduled for progressive release through the lifetime of the project. Each forthcoming section announces what it will contain and when.