For a Digital History of pandemics. Interconnection and multidisciplinary perspectives

Abstract

In an increasingly interconnected reality, the areas of research look - necessarily - at a remodelling of the IT architectures of archival portals, with the aim of an interdisciplinary vision capable of connecting the Present with the Past, in order to identify historical narratives and patterns able to enrich the epidemiological pictures, explain the modern pandemics, to be able to modify and record policies suitable to contain and face those of contemporaneity. A reformulation that is based on the application, in historical research, of tools that can reformulate the concept of digitized source, in order to derive, from it, all the information that scholars refer to. Today, information technologies, such as Data mining and the application of HTR (Handwriting Text Recognition) systems - such as the Transkribus platform - would allow us to increase and implement the information available, pushing historians towards research areas and sectors that are still unexplored.