Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 15, No. 350.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Fri, 02 Nov 2001 06:36:07 +0000
From: "Domenico Fiormonte" <mc9809@mclink.it>
Subject: For Giuseppe
Dear all,
I am sending a memory of Giuseppe Gigliozzi written by one of his
friend and colleague. Although written by one person, I think this
remarkable text expresses the feelings and represents the views of
everyone who knew Giuseppe and his story both as a scholar and a
man. The letter is dedicated to all the 'italianisti' who had the fortune
to meet, at least once, Giuseppe's unforgettable smile.
Domenico Fiormonte
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Long live the ghost in our machines
Giuseppe Gigliozzi died after a short illness on Sunday,
28th October. One month ago, he was appointed associate professor of Italian
Literature at Rome "La Sapienza" University.
Giuseppe was a pathologically modest man whose
reputation rests on his considerable pioneering achievements. In a
system where tradition is power, he took on vested interests,
persuaded the deciders, created a school based on true
Socratic principles, leading by example alone, without flaunting any of the
trappings of authority. His pupils, or rather spiritual colleagues,
received not just
theoretical and practical instruction in a new and exciting intellectual
domain, they also absorbed a permanent lesson about devotion,
human devotion. Long after local conflicts about TEI Lite and such
like have subsided, victims of a quickening pace of change both in
techniques and (more importantly) aims, the primary teaching of
Giuseppe will be still operative
offering us a model of why we should engage in the discipline, and
what its fundamental stance is towards intellectual enquiry.
Giuseppes early career was as a standard literary critic and
historian, specialising in twentieth century Italian literature (Alvaro,
Bilenchi,
Jovine. Malaparte, Silone, Pirandello). I say standard only in that
there is, in that field, a tradition and a recognised cursus honorum.
But Giuseppe wasnt really standard at all. Even then, there was a
quizzical tone (as far from conventional professorese as could
be imagined) and desire to challenge commonplaces, which set
him apart form his contemporaries. This independence, innate, and
possibly (as I suspect) wryly cultivated, did wonders in securing a
consistent lack of support for the advancement of his career as a
conventional critic.
Luckily, he had other ideas, and they were powerful ones. Like the
pioneers Padre Busa and Tito Orlandi, Giuseppe became
precociously aware, even when, as in the early days the technical
material itself was very crude, that informatics solutions were an
extremely promising avenue not just for linguistics but for the
much more demanding applications of literary and philological
study. With little in the way of institutional or financial support, but
with a gift for inspiring intellectually committed students, and
wheedling assistance from outside bodies not normally associated
with university activity, he set up pilot computing
projects which have become models imitated elsewhere. Anybody
who has entered his office (the mythical number 10 in the Faculty of
Letters) will have seen, improbably compressed into all the
available space, a history of hardware from the beginnings of
desktop technology to the present day. But the real museum is
virtual. It is what he, and particularly the young teams he had a gift
for inspiring, were able to do intellectually with the meagre
equipment at their disposal. It was this sense of teamwork that put
the Rome Faculty of Letters Computing Centre (CISADU), at the forefront of
philologically sound, as opposed to technomegalomanic
developments. The hallmark was always an economy of
means to service academically ambitious enquiry.
One of the most characteristic aspects of Giuseppes work has
been the perception (earlier than most) that the partners in digital
humanities are not necessarily all housed in universities. His own
outreach was considerable, in journalism (newspapers, radio and
TV), in the exciting environment of software houses, in library
science and lexicography, and even in surprisingly responsive
government departments. As a result of this outreach, his pupils,
unusually for a mandarinesque education system like Italys, had a
firm grasp of commercial and public realities, and moved
seamlessly between worlds which apparently had little
in common. Perhaps the greatest contribution, however, has been
his influence in getting the subject (and I hesitate to use the
singular) legally recognised as a university discipline.
Characteristically, this apparently prosaic, administrative
target became, in Giuseppes hands, an exciting and overarching
debate about the intellectual construction, or rather de-construction
and re-construction of university education in general, combining
the historical rigour of the past with the need to equip students as
future-proof
for the real world outside.
Those who want a detailed, English language impression of
Giuseppes tireless activity, his wide interests, his outreach and
curiosity, would do well to consult his entry in CISADU biographies
http://rmcisadu.let.uniroma1.it/crilet/personal/gigliozzi/gigliozzi.htm .
For those of you who have the good fortune to read Italian,
Giuseppes unique style of communication, unaffected, humorous
but always to the point, presenting new angles as a matter of
principle, can be savoured in an interview about digital
archives transcribed for
http://www.glocal.org/1999/001/e_forum.htm.
His is a ghost which inhabits my machine, and needs no upgrade.
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