Textológia

Textológia, or textology, is an interdisciplinary field that studies texts as textual artifacts and acts of communication within cultural, historical, and social contexts. It concerns how texts are produced, transmitted, edited, circulated, and interpreted, as well as how different versions and editions reflect choices by authors, editors, and readers. The term is used across languages and overlaps with philology, literary studies, linguistics, and digital humanities.

The scope of textolóia includes a wide range of text types, such as literary works, religious scriptures, legal documents, newspapers, and online content. Central concerns include textuality—the ways in which texts encode meaning through form—textual criticism and editing practices, textual variants, authorship, reception, and genre. The field often examines how texts change across manuscript traditions, print editions, and digital formats, as well as how context influences interpretation.

Methods and approaches combine close reading and stylistics with discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and stylometry. Textología also draws on manuscript studies, codicology, and editorial theory to produce reliable editions and critical apparatus. In the digital era, it employs digital editing, TEI markup, text mining, and computational analysis to study large corpora and transmission patterns.

Relation to other disciplines is strong: it intersects with literary studies, linguistics, history, religious studies, information science, and media studies. Its applications include producing scholarly critical editions, preserving cultural heritage, tracing the evolution of language and discourse, supporting translation, and enabling data-driven humanities research.