Textual heritage e il futuro delle digital humanities

This article aims to give an overview of the relationship between digital humanities and cultural heritage, and of the role these relatively new concepts may play in the rethinking of textual products – first of all literary works – and their circulation in the digital dimension, as well as in the reflection about the function and utility of literary studies in the 21st century. Starting from a survey of UNESCO programs aimed to demonstrate that textual products have been hitherto ignored by the academic and institutional debate on cultural heritage, the article proposes the concept of ‘textual heritage’, arguing that this new theoretical category may help to reframe the history of textual production and transmission, and implicitly to open literary studies to a wider and interdisciplinary horizon of inquiries that connects them to a public, social, democratic dimension, that may be summarized by the question: what to do with and how to reuse texts of the past?