Umanistica Digitale

Review: E. Carbé. 2023. Digitale d’autore. Macchine, archivi, letterature. Firenze: Firenze University Press; Siena: USiena Press.

2023-08-20T11:03:14+02:00

How to foster the preservation and study of a born-digital literary archive? In the three chapters that comprise Digitale d’autore. Macchine, archivi, letterature the question is tackled from multiple points of view. In the first, after defining the object of investigation, Emmanuela Carbé outlines the historical, theoretical, and methodological aspects, including a definition of the relationship between writers and computers. This gives way in the central part of the volume to a review of the main experiences on both the national and international stage. Finally, the last section is dedicated to the critical framing of a work by investigating the born-digital archive conferred by the author to the institution in charge of its preservation.

Masked texts: new tools for the security and linguistic analysis of legal corpora

2023-05-03T00:13:17+02:00

The Atti Chiari project, collecting the first large Italian corpus of judicial acts, presents strict legal requirements as well as many peculiarities in terms of language and content; to meet them, a number of processes and tools have been designed and implemented. The first issue is the requirement to remove any personal data from the documents, without however destroying their linguistic form, nor compromising their readability. To this end, a pseudonymisation procedure has been created based on a preliminary annotation stage, which adds information right in order to remove it in different ways, according to different purposes (linguistic analysis, legal analysis, etc.). At the same time, this light annotation provides data useful not only for pseudonymization, but also for the conversion of documents, from their original presentational format into a semantic one based on TEI. Once documents have been prepared in this way, they are then centralized in a corpus, ready to be indexed for linguistic research. Given the multiple search criteria that must be combined, whatever their origin and model, a new type of search engine, designed primarily in the philological field, has been used here to obtain the required openness and granularity of metadata.

Enhancing readability and comprehension of medical reports: a comparison between two online text simplification tools

2023-04-18T17:13:44+02:00

Medical reports are a fundamental text type in the life of patients, but also one of the most difficult ones to understand by non-specialists. For this reason, software tools specifically devoted to the simplification of medical texts, including reports, have been developed.
In this paper, we analysed the performance of two different text simplification tools in a sample of fifty medical reports in English. Both tools support lexical simplification, while one of the tools also provides suggestions for syntactic simplification. We compared the two tools by calculating the readability index of each medical report before and after being processed by the tools. To this aim, we used two different readability formulas.
Both tools succeeded in producing some degree of simplification; however, their performance strongly varied depending on the text and the readability formula considered.

History, objects, web. Collections and digital tools for digital public history

2023-03-17T16:45:25+01:00

Thanks to the spread of digital archives and collections, Public Historians have access to millions of digitized items, texts, and sounds reusable for historical communication on the web. This good practice encourages the production of narrations alternative to the official ones and acknowledges the educational value of material culture in the historiographical context. In this essay, we analyze some international and Italian digital collections to evaluate the query process and the reuse possibilities of the catalogued materials; furthermore, we describe some graphic and digital storytelling software to create multimedial, interactive content from digitized items. Eventually, we discuss three-dimensional digital objects, the frontier of digital collections: occasionally, they are employed in projects to produce immersive virtual realities. They are rich in potentiality but also puzzling; we can overcome difficulties by cooperating with expert computer scientists and adequately managing funds to create, store and make reusable three-dimensional digital items.

Reading novels in Einaudi: the case of Natalia Ginzburg. Reading opinions under the scrutiny of Digital Humanities.

2023-06-13T09:34:06+02:00

This paper presents the results of the modelling and analysis of the reading process within the Italian publishing house Einaudi after the Second World War, with a special focus on Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991). More specifically, the corpus of sources consists of the reading reports concerning contemporary narrative works, which represent a fundamental step in the decision-making process that leads to the publication of a work and therefore to the construction of the catalogue of a publishing house. The examination of Natalia Ginzburg’s reading reports, mostly unpublished, provides the basis for a critical reflection on her editorial activity, a reflection which is rooted in the belief that editorial writing represents a complex critical genre that deserves to be investigated by specific methods.

The tools (in the present case UML, PostgreSQL, XML TEI) and methods of the Digital Humanities have made a major contribution to the realisation of the scientific objectives of the research work. On the one hand, they have made it possible to model, represent and interrogate the corpus of documents in a relevant and efficient way; on the other hand, they were fundamental and indispensable from a methodological, heuristic and interpretative point of view.

Artificial Intelligence in archival and historical scholarship workflow: HTS and ChatGPT

2023-08-21T11:15:56+02:00

This article examines the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the archival heritage digitization processes, specifically regarding the manuscripts’ automatic transcription, their correction, and normalization. It highlights how digitality has compelled scholars to redefine Archive and History field and has facilitated the accessibility of analogue sources through digitization and integration into big data. The study focuses on two AI systems, namely Transkribus and ChatGPT, which enable efficient analysis and transcription of digitized sources. The article presents a test of ChatGPT, which was utilized to normalize the text of 366 letters stored in the “Correspondence” section of the Biscari Archive (Catania). Although the AI exhibited some limitations that resulted in inaccuracies, the corrected texts met expectations. Overall, the article concludes that digitization and AI can significantly enhance archival and historical research by allowing the analysis of vast amounts of data and the application of computational linguistic tools.

Modelling The Art Market in The Semantic Web. A Preliminary Analysis

2023-06-20T13:56:33+02:00

The paper presents the current stage of an ongoing project at the Fondazione Federico Zeri, aimed at the modelling of the art market starting from the recognition of the peculiarities of this sector and relying on the data collected by this institute during its research activities on its documentary collection. Specifically, this essay provides a preliminary analysis of the domain, aimed at guiding in the development of an ontology able to describe agents, events and sources which define the art market and enable its investigation. The recognition of existing conceptual models is hence followed by a reconstruction of the studied domain thanks to motivating scenario, examples and competency questions collected during the first iteration of the SAMOD methodology. For each scenario, the paper will provide the most relevant entities and will draft an alignment with existing ontologies, as well as propose necessary integrations.

Advanced Interface Design for IIIF. A Digital Tool to Explore Image Collections at Different Scales

2023-06-20T13:53:23+02:00

This article introduces a proposal for an experimental interface design that uses the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) to facilitate the exploration of image collections through the navigation of relational models created by the scholarly practice of annotation. Within the project From Data To Wisdom, an innovative digital tool was designed by harnessing IIIF resources and leveraging close and distant reading on three levels of detail: micro, meso, and macro. The proposed tool integrates annotation features that enable scholars to analyze individual images and interpret broader connections and patterns across image sets. This article outlines the experimental interface’s theoretical framework, design principles, and significant advantages, highlighting the potential to support interdisciplinary research and advancements in digital art.

A 'distant' reading of A Muvra: exploring the autonomist press in the Corsican language through topic modelling

2023-08-01T21:10:38+02:00

The aim of this article is to explore the autonomist press in the Corsican language through topic modelling. In order to do so, the effectiveness of two topic modelling methods, LDA and LSA, will be compared on a trilingual corpus - Italian, Croatian and French - not subject to lemmatization, not only in order to assess the results obtained, but also to understand which of these methods comes closest to our previous knowledge on the subject, which is the result of a close reading.

Judging books from the cover: for a data-base of Renaissance dialogue-forms in Italy

2023-09-27T15:56:52+02:00

The paper aims to propose the first results of a quantitative survey on the dialogue-form in the Italian Renaissance. Among the characteristics of this writing and argumentative practice, spread especially between the sixteenth and sixteenth centuries, there is in fact the vast print production. A macroscopic vision of this phenomenon allows, through a quantitative and qualitative investigation at the same time, to evaluate generic trends, to study publishing practices related to the dissemination of knowledge and, finally, to grasp with greater precision the moments of historical evolution of this form of writing.

ChatGPT-4 and Italian Dialects: Assessing Linguistic Competence

2023-10-09T10:31:43+02:00

The purpose of this study is to evaluate ChatGPT-4’s language proficiency in Italian dialects. At the outset, it is clarified what is meant by ‘language ability’ within the context of Large Language Models. This involves identifying the tasks that ChatGPT might face in real-world scenarios, from which we can derive inferential assumptions regarding its linguistic ability. The skills identified, which served as foundation for test design, include comprehension and translation, dialect recognition, analysis of the distinctive features, error detection, text production, interaction, theoretical background, and self-assessment. The tests were crafted to mimic situations requiring these competencies, trying to emulate authentic ChatGPT-User interactions. The results highlight ChatGPT’s excellent prowess in understanding and recognizing Italian dialects and their subvarieties, and a robust background and awareness of its own knowledge. However, the model exhibits significant gaps in analytical skills and struggles with text production and interactive tasks, suggesting superior passive linguistic capabilities compared to active ones.