Umanistica Digitale

Erratum: Historical Network Analysis and Htr tools for a digital methodological historical approach to the Biscari Archive of Catania

2023-01-09T15:05:50+01:00

Graphic Symbols in Late Antique and Early Medieval Documentation: the NOTAE Project and the Creation of an Open-Access Database

2023-05-24T16:50:45+02:00

Late antique and early medieval documents often feature graphic symbols – graphic entities that may be composed of alphabetic or non-alphabetic signs – that communicate something different or something more than the written text. The NOTAE research project is concerned with the identification and classification of such graphic symbols, while also attempting to investigate the meaning they convey or take on in a definite context. This report illustrates the structure and operational functions of the open-access database, the main product of the project, in which graphic symbols, at the present more than six thousand, result catalogued, described and classified by type.

Review: Ježek, E. & Sprugnoli, R. (cur.). 2023. Linguistica computazionale. Introduzione all’analisi auto-matica dei testi. Bologna: il Mulino

2023-06-18T21:44:46+02:00

This review is dedicated to the book Linguistica computazionale by Elisabetta Ježek and Rachele Sprugnoli, which serves as a concise and comprehensive introduction to the use of computational tools in linguistic research and, more broadly, in natural language processing. The eight chapters of this volume provide a succinct overview of a wide range of disciplines, activities, approaches, tools, and resources, making it particularly suitable for beginners in the field. Special attention is given to the role of artificial intelligence throughout the book.

Human Enhancement and the Post-human subject to the test of DH. How digital technologies are transforming us

2022-10-25T14:53:48+02:00

This contribution focuses on the role played by digital technologies in transforming the human condition. Digital technologies are presented as a particular form of Human Enhancement already in place, in contrast with the transhumanist positions. Transhumanists trace in GRIN (geno-, robo-, info-, nano-) technologies the conditions for desirable future human enhancement in terms of physical and cognitive performance and capabilities. Analysing the perspectives addressed by the Digital Humanities and taking into account theories on the Post-Human, our purpose is presenting digital technologies as foundational elements of an enhancement already in place, capable of realising the elements of interrelation, synchronicity, hybridisation of the authentic Post-human being.

A new digital mapping for the villages of the inland areas

2023-01-11T15:40:49+01:00

Villages and inland areas of Italy are the subject of some strategic interventions of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR). Nevertheless, the focus is mainly on the territories included in the tourist circuits, without considering the specificities, fragility, accessibility conditions, relations with the surrounding area, the identity, and cultural vocations of numerous other "minor" centers.

Starting from these assumptions, research was undertaken aimed at redefining the village entity (called borgo in Italian) based on the relationships between urban aggregates and surrounding territories. The starting point was to circumscribe the concept of village in anthropic ecosystems delimited within 5,000 inhabitants, in which the constituent elements contribute to defining the identities of local communities. According to this approach, more than 5,500 villages have been surveyed in the Peninsula, of which relations with the territories of reference have been analyzed.

With a view to validating the starting assumption, a digital platform of regional maps has been created which, presenting the specificities of each territory through many indicators, provide data and information useful for framing the identities and relationships between local communities, cultural heritage, landscape, services, etc. with the different territorial areas.

Landscapes of the on-demand media encounter

2022-11-24T13:45:06+01:00

The aim of this paper is to identify theoretical observation paths applicable to the abrupt evolution of the platform-based audiovisual streaming market. Starting from an awareness of the field that takes into account Media Studies - both in its production and distribution aspects - and Platform Studies, it is proposed here to apply a methodology derived from ethnographic observation and structural analysis (ethnosemiotics) to bring back to the debate both effective and operational descriptions of the actors involved in the market, as well as theoretical figurations on which to exercise ethical and intersubjective readings, opening up phenomenological problems concerning the immanence of on-demand consumption practices. The paper considers the epistemological field of reference, traces the foundations of the applied methodological proposal and shows the first results of descriptive effectiveness on paradigmatic case studies (Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+), resulting in the introduction of the research fields that all this is meant to open.

A new reading of the economic system of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany through the georeferencing of shops and factories at the time of the setting up of the Lorraine Land Registry (1835)

2023-03-08T11:24:47+01:00

This paper focuses on the reconstruction of the social and economic conditions of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in the mid eighteen thirties on the basis of recent geohistorical information. To perform this reconstruction, we georeferenced information relating to the nineteenth-century factories and shops recorded in the Land Registry. To date, this aspect has received little attention when considering the historiographic traditions of this area, firmly rooted in a sharecropping system based on the three main Mediterranean agricultural products.

The use of geostatistical tools allowed us to determine the height and slope of each of the geometries in the two geodatabases. We were also able to create positive spatial data autocorrelations, determine specific production and trading areas and thus determine the anthropisation levels of these territories in the outlying areas of the State.

The online publication of these geographical databases on the cartographic portal of the Tuscany Region through a dedicated WebGIS was the last phase of our study. Considering both the number and density of geometries surveyed, our work is an extraordinary example of how geohistorical research may be combined with new technologies for the purpose of studying geohistorical content and disseminating it to the general public.

Text analysis of Vittorio Alfieri’s Panegirico di Plinio a Trajano

2023-04-01T10:03:28+02:00

This paper will provide some observations on the digital study of Vittorio Alfieri's Panegirico di Plinio a Trajano, investigating how text analysis can become a supporting, creative and efficient tool for computer editions of texts. The potential for producing editions that move towards greater digital sustainability will also be explored.

Researching, mapping and promoting the cultural heritage of Florence and its territory

2023-02-21T09:04:15+01:00

One of the most urgent challenges for European academic and cultural institutions is to promote an intelligent use of materials and resources available on the web, by implementing best practices of web archiving, and building scientifically valid databases which can have a positive social impact. This paper will present the theoretical and methodological framework of Eredità Culturali, an ongoing project that aims at answering this challenge by focusing on the Florentine cultural heritage. The first stage of Eredità Culturali consisted in surveying similar initiatives within the European research landscape and examining national and international cataloguing models and standards to build a data entry prototype that interacts with other systems. Hence, a flexible and open-access web platform has been designed to validate, preserve and consult cultural information from disparate data sets into a single archive. A geo-referenced information system has also been developed, in which four databases designed by the Department's research groups of Geography, Archaeology, Performing Arts and History of the Book will converge and make sound data available for both non-academic and professional audiences. The analytical investigation is integrated with original ways of dissemination that will facilitate historical connections between different cultural heritages and legacies.

ASMSA. The digital atlas of Sardinian maritime history

2023-04-28T19:18:37+02:00

This article presents the Digital Atlas for the Maritime History of Sardinia (ASMSA), created by integrating various applications within the framework of DH UNICA activities - the centre for digital humanities at the University of Cagliari. The Atlas was developed as a tool for building a fundamental cognitive platform on the maritime history of the Kingdom of Sardinia, but it is designed to facilitate a team workflow structured according to the most established methods of historical research and to address a significant gap in the historiographical landscape.

Close reading and idea encoding: digital edition of opera libretti

2023-05-04T16:15:31+02:00

This paper reviews the preparatory and operational stages that led to the development of the digital scientific edition of 57 musical dramas staged in the Republic of Lucca between 1636 and 1705 to celebrate an important political event. This case study prompts a reflection on the relationship between digital humanities and opera theater by providing a detailed state of the art: the increased interest in databases and the significant number of amateurs of the genre explain both the detected distance from the textual data and the poor online availability of philologically curated libretti. Instead, the present edition focuses on the content of the operas in terms of textual typologies, use of sources and characters and, in particular, political ideas. In describing the XML-TEI encoding scheme, this paper aims to show interpretive close reading can enhance the analysis of certain concepts, political in this case, through markup. Although acknowledging some limitations, such as the risk of overlapping and the lack of unambiguous IDs, the results highlight a new way of conceiving the commentary of digital editions which provides scholars with the possibility of using digital tools to annotate and visualize exegetical reading.

Digital residencies: Theatre goes online

2023-06-12T12:37:26+02:00

Digital Residencies Project (2020-) was born during the 2020 lockdown from an idea of a network of Italian National Theatres: their aim was to involve the artistic community on the development and the experimentation of new digital art/performance forms designed for the online environment only; starting from a call for artistic proposal, the goal was to immerse audience connected into the web, in new formats of theatrical narration or choreographies at a time in which all the cultural spaces were completely closed. Over four years, the winning projects have proposed: interactive storytelling, theatre piéce with the use of Virtual Reality or of the social platforms; theatrical narration supported by Artificial Intelligence, new audiovisual formats, immersive narrations with of 360° cameras, story tellings with the aid of chat bots. The evolution of technological proposals is the focus of the research in this paper, connecting them with analysis of the historical process of evolution of the Networked Theatres and networked Public and the meaning and the new forms of digital liveness and virtual theatres.

LexicO: an Italian Computational Lexicon derived from Parole-Simple-Clips

2023-01-17T10:14:54+01:00

Parole-Simple-Clips (PSC) is a computational lexicon of the Italian language, developed from 1996 to 2003 by the Institute of Computational Linguistics of the Italian National Research Council (ILC-CNR) in the context of national and European projects. The PSC resource is strongly structured and rich of data, and may provide an edge over existing linguistic resources if used in the support of NLP and text retrieval related tasks, such as, as currently being experimented, for full-text search. However, the lexicon still appears incomplete and contains some redundant, erroneous and missing data. This paper documents the first steps undertaken for the creation of LexicO, an Italian computational lexicon built upon PSC starting from an in depth analysis of its four linguistic layers (semantic, syntactic, morphological and phonological) in which it is structured. As a result of this work, LexicO has been released and made freely available for download.