On Graziella Tonfoni interviewing Tonfoni Graziella

Readers may think that this is just one more review, meant to promote one more book, by a very prolific author. Actually this is just a premise, reflecting and faithfully reporting the author's voice, a short self-reflective contribution - in Italian - by Graziella Tonfoni, indicating that there are obviously enduring difficulties for any bilingual scientist today in finding niches for fast and accurate academic publishing, in a world of widest and often wildest interconnectivity, and most affluent academic literature in the making, when it comes to expressing herself in her native language, Italian in fact.
 
We are considering a scientist who has been conceiving and composing in English for thirty years. And she still is, while currently trying to publish in Italian as to be able to express culturally bound concepts, while operating in Italy, in ways which are consistent with currently existing trends of science in the territory, a very crowded one.

Difficulties when it comes to be able to express culture bound concepts, effectively and affectively, are also due to an extreme number of younger scientists and doctoral students in search for stable academic positions. Further difficulties are also due to the wide number of young writers looking for a fast carrier in literature, seeking very aggressively high and prompt visibility.

A well established scientific author and pioneer, as Tonfoni Graziella has been for thirty years of constant work, may be considered to be “doing scientifically and literarily fairly well” in spite of the expanding crowd of writers seeking immediate success.

She is also witnessing and vividly reminding the US heritage she has been and is a representative of, as she never stopped indicating, referencing, quoting, maintaining bibliographies of relevance out of her near past.

She is also very proud of her own methodologies and theories, which do reflect into a large set of her books in English of real momentum, and surface out of so many articles and chapters she has conceived, produced and composed originally in English, the lingua franca in scientific research, and which were all published and often even reprinted also in Italian.

Continuity and care and scholarly commitment toward teaching have allowed her own classics in the field of artificial intelligence to remain valid items in the compatible areas of computational studies by and large, thanks to her constantly ongoing initiatives reminding new generations of “good old times” in the field of text linguistics and at the “golden age” of cognitive science.

Each of her efforts needs therefore to be capitalized and considered as a true source of inspiration for a widest readership: each of her printed pages is the result of context sensitive research, fully verified, reflecting into very valuable books, which will go throughout ages as witnessing discoveries of real momentum. All which has been authored by Tonfoni Graziella and published is still worth many quotations, also for the very present and meant to be preserved for the future. This very peculiar author is deliberately avoiding keeping up with current literature in the field of computation, to make sure that her own way of reasoning is not being influenced by others' theories, while her concern about avoiding lines and concepts which others have already been discovering or are practicing is continuing all along, with some scattered browsing just to have a sense of what is going on in the fields. She remains committed to fixing mistakes and misleading lines of reasoning which come out of a way too fast dissemination of unverified data, if asked to do so.

Her recent compendium (selected bibliography) clearly indicates that this author is moving way beyond current literature, including her own computational literature as she does continue to carry on her daily and never ending scientific commitment to Advanced Documentation Systems Evolutions and Context Bound Adaptation in Complex and Interconnected Environments.

Aim of Bibliografia Selezionata dei Classici (1979-2009) by Graziella Tonfoni is to remind readers of her life in science while proposing that her current literary efforts in Italian showing in a literary appendix (“Rilecturae Romanae”) may be considered and noticed in the PECOB area as well.
The following interview – in Italian – is meant to enlighten just a few aspects of a scientific and literary author of such complexity as to make sure that readers of PECOB countries may be aware of a wealth of studies scattered all over the web already. No need for links to any other sites, as there are so many already listed and fully available, but yes of course good to hear the Italian voice of the author through a self-interview published on PECOB.