The course will provide an introduction to the field of Digital Humanities (DH), analyzing languages, models, tools, and infrastructures for both the study and the preservation of cultural heritage. After introducing the main theories, methodologies, and techniques, the course will review some applications of DH in the research areas of philology, epigraphy, papyrology, linguistics, and literary criticism. Combining presentations of theoretical concepts, an overview of projects in the field of DH, and practical activities, the course will enable students to familiarize themselves with the standard models employed in the different research areas of DH and to acquire skills in digital project planning for the humanities.
Course Prerequisites
Good knowledge of the internet, basic computer skills.
Teaching Methods
Lectures and tutorials. During the tutorials, students will learn to develop small projects in each of the research areas covered in class.
Assessment Methods
Practical project to be carried out using at least one of the tools analyzed in class, ex: preparation and analysis of a linguistic corpus employing the NLP pipeline; critical edition of a manuscript (one or more pages) / papyrus / epigraph; creation of a small digital collection of texts, images, audio and/or video files; authorship analysis of one or more texts.
Students will be asked to present their project during the final oral exam. During the exam, students will also be asked questions on the first part of the course.
Further readings will be proposed and discussed during the course.
Contents
The course is organized on two macro sections:
1. History of Digital Humanities and analysis of the main transversal tools: - History of Digital Humanities, a sketch; - Introduction to text encoding (ASCII, Unicode); - Markup languages (XML and schema, TEI); - Data display systems (HTML + CSS for the construction and styling of web pages); - The interface design (web page elements and browsing systems); - The semantic web and the paradigm of Linked Open Data (URIs, RDFs, and ontologies; FAIR principles).
2. Applications of Digital Humanities in the different research areas: - Digital scholarship and textual editing for manuscripts, papyri, and inscriptions (TEI's apparatus module and EpiDoc; Oxygen XML Editor); - Building and using language resources: lexical databases, annotated corpora; stylometry.
The selection of topics for the second part of the course may be adjusted according to the students’ interests and needs.
Course Language
English
More information
Students are encouraged to bring their own laptops to classes.
