The Humanities and the Development of Digital Technologies

This article puts literary digital forms and scholarly discussions on them on the map of the development of the humanities. The digital humanities are shown to attend to the formation of tools that are appropriate to the study of the artistic texts, which is changing in terms of semiotics, discourse and communication. Szczesna points out the unique traits of the literary hypertext - textual interventions that initiate the construction and development of semiopoetics. These are, in particular, the creation of kinetic figures (adjection, detraction, permutation, atomization);,alternative narrations; the construction of a plot on the level of representation; the creation of textual meanings in the interaction of the semantics of the word as a graphic-sonoric sign and as an arbitrary sign. One interesting effect of the digitalization of texts and discourses is the creation of macrotexts - multi-textual and multi-authored constructions which, by interacting, give rise to additional meanings.