Summer School

Pisa Lungarni

Summer School “Digital tools for Humanists” 2024

In the frame of the Summer Schools organized by the University of Pisa, under the direction of the “Laboratorio di Cultura Digitale” (Laboratory for Digital Culture, see site in Italian), the seventh edition of the Summer School “Digital Tools for Humanists” will be held in Pisa from June 3 to June 12, both in presence and online via Microsoft Teams.

The School is addressing all those interested in getting basic and working knowledge of some of the digital tools available today to scholars in many different fields of the Humanities. The edition of 2024 will focus on tools and applications dealing mostly with texts and applications of AI.

“AI’s relevance in text-related applications, spanning both contemporary and historical contexts, is profound. It enables information retrieval from vast text corpora, bridges language barriers through machine translation, and generates concise summaries of extensive texts. AI’s sentiment analysis helps gauge public opinion, while text-to-speech technology ensures accessibility for visually impaired individuals. It aids in the digitization and preservation of historical documents, making them digitally accessible. AI’s recommendation systems offer relevant content suggestions, and it excels in information extraction and understanding. Language models like GPT-3 enhance text generation and comprehension, facilitating automated content creation and interactive chatbots. For historians and researchers, AI streamlines the analysis of historical texts, revealing insights and connections that manual methods may overlook. In essence, AI’s impact on text-related tasks is transformative, benefiting contemporary and historical applications alike.”

Just to prove the relevance of AI in text applications, it may be interesting to know that the above paragraph was generated by Chat-GPT in response to a request to summarize the relevance of AI for text applications, and it has been copied here without any editing at all. In the Summer School we will not be able to cover all the applications mentioned by Chat-GPT, but we will try to highlight some of the advancements that AI has made possible in the wide field of text processing.

In the first week the focus will be on the basic application fields of text processing, like Natural Language Processing, or Philological Digital Editions, or applications in Digital Public History; in the second week the focus will be more specifically on Artificial Intelligence topics, like Large Language Models and AI and Ethics.

The School will maintain its character of being “practice oriented”, and all the afternoons will be dedicated to hands-on laboratories. The minimum requirement for enrolling in the School is a Bachelor degree, in any discipline. Graduate students and professionals in the Humanities, such as PhD students, librarians, teachers, researchers, archivists are the perspective participants of the School. In order to get the maximum benefit from the School, it is recommended to all attendees to bring their own Personal Computer. No specific pre-requisites are requested, except for some familiarity in the use of computers and, of course, a good interest in Digital Humanities.

The 2024 edition is organized again over two weeks and there is the possibility of enrolling just for the first week or enrolling for the whole duration. It has to be noted that from an administrative point of view those two alternatives appear as two different Summer Schools, and therefore there are two different registration procedures.

Digital Tools for Humanists – Working on texts will be held from June 3 to June 7 (go to program). The registration fee for attending only this one-week School is 250 Euros plus 50 Euros for didactic material, and the University of Pisa, upon request, will issue a certificate of 3 credits (ECTS, the European Credit Transfer System). It will be the responsibility of the attendees to have this certificate recognized at their own Institution (go to registration procedure).

Digital Tools for Humanists – Working with AI will be held from June 3 to June 12 (go to program). The registration fee for attending this two-week School is 500 Euros, and the University of Pisa, upon request, will issue a certificate of 6 credits. It will be the responsibility of the attendees to have this certificate recognized at their own Institution (go to registration procedure).

The School is supported by CLARIN-IT, the Italian node of CLARIN, the ERIC Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure, aiming to make digital language resources available to scholars, researchers, students and citizen-scientists from all disciplines, especially in the humanities and social sciences, through single sign-on access.

The School is under the auspices of AIUCD, the Italian Association for Digital Humanities and Culture, of AIPH, the Italian Association od Public History and of CISPH, the Interuniversity Centre for Research and Development of Public History

The number of participants at the Schools is limited, and registrations will be accepted until there are available seats.

DEADLINE: April 30th 2024