Fragmentary narrative and the formation of pre-digital scholarly hypertextuality: G. Leopardi's Zibaldone and its hypertext rendition

Native scholarly hypertext is a rare genre which issues from a particular cognitive experience that is difficult to translate in expository academic writing. The fragmentary form of some research note collections of eminent unconventional intellectuals from the pre-digital age exhibits the groundwork of hypertext. Giacomo Leopardi's Zibaldone is one such text comprised of ca. 10,000 internal and external references, and thematic indexes with ca. 11,000 referenced fragments. The TEI encoding of the manuscript and its hypertext rendition, undertaken by a group of scholars and technologists at Princeton University, provide insight into the genesis of dialectical thought, grapple with the inadequacy of current technology to represent its hypertextuality, and raise questions about hypertext's potentialities for being adopted by scholars today.