Tuesday June 13

09.00 – 12.30	Refresher on computers and networking Vittore Casarosa (ISTI-CNR and University of Pisa) One (simple) way to think of Digital Humanities is to think that it is just the use of “digital tools” in the study and research activities carried on by scholars in the Humanities. To better understand how digital tools work, and for the benefit of all those who were exposed to Computer Science a long time ago, or have been only marginally touched by it, we will briefly review the basics of computer architecture and the representation of information within a computer. We will also see how the evolution of computer technology and of communication networks has led, in the early ’90, to the explosive growth of the Internet and the Web, and how the actual Web is (slowly) evolving towards the Semantic Web.
12.30 – 14.00	Lunch
14.00 – 18.00	Research Infrastructures supporting FAIR and Open data, tools, practices in the humanities and social sciences. The case of CLARIN Monica Monachini (ILC-CNR), Francesca Frontini (ILC-CNR) This 4-hour module is intended to be an introduction on research infrastructures (RIs) in the field of Social Sciences and Humanities. After a short recap on FAIR and Open Data, participants will learn how to incorporate and exploit RIs data, knowledge, and practices in their research. More specifically, we will concentrate on CLARIN, the European Common Language Resources and Technology infrastructure, with hands-on modules where participants will learn how to (F)ind resources, (A)ccess them, exploit them with (I)nteroperable tools and (R)euse them. Central CLARIN tools such as the Virtual Language Observatory and the Switchboard will be presented, but also the wider network of data and knowledge centres (including those operated by the Italian CLARIN-IT consortium). We will focus in particular on the search and querying of historical records, both written and oral. We will also showcase highly interoperable resources, such as the ParlaMint corpus, as an example of best practices in the field, particularly well-suited for diachronic and comparative studies in contemporary history and social science. We will conclude with an overview of the current panorama of RIs, extending our focus beyond CLARIN, to the Social Sciences and Humanities Open marketplace and to national initiatives such as the Humanities and Heritage Italian Open Science Cloud (H2IOSC), focussing on training materials as a special type of resources that RIs share and maintain.

Wednesday June 14

09.00 – 12.30	CMSs: WordPress and Omeka Chiara Mannari (ISTI-CNR and University of Pisa) This session will focus on some of the tools useful for creating a website to display and disseminate digital contents related to research activities. After an introduction to the main challenges in web design and development, a practical session will be dedicated to set up some simple websites together with the students. The web sites will be based on WordPress and Omeka, two of the most popular content management systems. WordPress is often associated with blogging, but it is a self-publishing platform supporting many data types. It is estimated that presently it runs in over 60 millions websites and its flexibility offers support to any kind of project. Less commercial than WordPress, Omeka is often associated with online exhibits and catalogues, but it also offers many facilities for publishing online media-rich and text collections, becoming the ideal tool for the creation of digital libraries.
12.30 – 14.00	Lunch
14.00 – 17.30	CMSs: Word and Omeka Chiara Mannari (ISTI-CNR and University of Pisa) Continuation of CMSs: Word and Omeka

Thursday June 15

09.00 – 12.30	Graphic applications and 3D objects Marco Potenziani (ISTI-CNR), Marco Callieri (ISTI-CNR) Nowadays 3D data are becoming more and more a key digital media. This is particularly true for the Cultural Heritage domain, in which it is common practice to exploit 3D technology to document historical sites, analyse the sources of the past, restore archaeological findings, and disseminate project results. Nevertheless, despite the variety of uses, the current panorama reveals several shortcomings and “missing links”: unsolved issues, uncovered users, neglected fields. 3DHOP (3D Heritage Online Presenter) is an open-source software solution aimed at mitigating these shortcomings. Developed by CNR-ISTI as a publishing framework for the interactive visualization of complex 3D datasets online, it has been expressly designed to simplify the creation of Web3D content specifically addressed to the humanities domain. After a general introduction to the worlds of 3D graphics applications, the course will introduce the subject of 3D web publishing: interactive visualization tools and methodologies, the quest between local and web-based tools, data sharing and cooperative visual analysis. Moreover, it will give a brief overview of 3DHOP, introducing its main features and characterizing tools. Finally, there will be a “hands-on” part in which students can experiment with 3DHOP.
12.30 – 14.00	Lunch
14.00 – 17.30	Graphic applications and 3D objects Marco Potenziani (ISTI-CNR), Marco Callieri (ISTI-CNR) Continuation of Graphic applications and 3D objects.

Friday June 16

09.00 – 12.30	Accessing and transforming historic media Seamus Ross (University of Toronto) Digital forensics will play an increasingly important role in future humanities scholarship. As more and more of our lives are lived online the footprints society is leaving for future scholars are digital. Digital forensics provides mechanism to secure, uncover and analyze digital evidence related to humanities topics such as history, literature, and art. Digital forensics is revolutionizing the way scholars from anthropology to history to literary studies will conduct research and discover evidence in the digital space. By leveraging new technologies and techniques, digital forensics can provide detailed accounts of digital material including insights into how digital materials were created, exchanged, used, transformed, and stored. This session will look at the challenges of preserving a range of digital media from documents and email to social media to websites and the tools that are available to study them. The session will be split between interactive lecture and lab-based activities involving digital archaeology and examination of digital material.
12.30 – 14.00	Lunch
14.00 – 17.30	Accessing and transforming historic media Seamus Ross (University of Toronto) Continuation of Accessing and transforming historic media.

 

 

Week 2 – June 19 to June 22 2023

Monday June 19

09.00 – 12.30	Designing a project in Digital Public History Enrica Salvatori (University of Pisa) The main characteristics of a Digital Public History project involving private and public realities of the territory will be illustrated, with the description of the main phases of its organization, implementation, maintenance and conservation. In the practical part we will try to create a work team on a concrete project and to design a possible work plan. Some existing projects will be analyzed by evaluating their characteristics from the point of view of the structure, sustainability, transparency of information and relations with different audiences.
12.30 – 14.00	Lunch
14.00 – 17.30	Designing a project in Digital Public History Enrica Salvatori (University of Pisa) Continuation of Designing a project in Digital Public History

Tuesday June 20

09.00 – 12.30	Methods and tools for digital philology Roberto Rosselli Del Turco (University of Torino), Elisabetta Magnanti (University of Wien) Digital philology is a fairly recent discipline aiming at applying ICT methods and tools to textual criticism. Quite a number of new digital editions have been published during the last twenty years or so. Many of them, however, are achieved by programming and configuring complex frameworks only accessible to medium-large research groups. Although the encoding of text in TEI-XML format allows the individual scholar to prepare a digital edition, the online publication and navigation still remain a complicated, potentially expensive, operation. EVT (Edition Visualization Technology) is an open-source tool the purpose of which is to allow the publication of scholarly TEI-based editions in an easy way, through a user-friendly interface and making available several research tools. This course will introduce the subject of digital philology and text encoding using the TEI-XML standard. It will be followed by a hands-on final session in which students will be able to experiment with EVT.
12.30 – 14.00	Lunch
14.00 – 17.30	Methods and tools for digital philology Roberto Rosselli Del Turco (University of Torino), Elisabetta Magnanti (University of Wien) Continuation of Methods and tools for digital philology.

Wednesday June 21

09.00 – 12.30	Historical GIS Tiago Gil (University of Pisa and University of Brasilia) In recent years, cartography has made significant advances in the representation of narratives and historical processes, both in literary criticism and in studies on displacements in social history, such as migrations, pilgrimages, transhumance, and commercial flows, amongst other instances. The purpose of this course is to discuss the cartographic representation of the movement and to develop skills in the creation of cartography aimed at representing historical processes as well as (textual and oral) narratives. Journey diaries, literary sources, and general documentation on population displacement will be sources used to discuss cartographic methods and techniques. Purpose software for cartography and languages such as R and python will be used through specific “libraries” (software packages) for these approaches. The session will consist of: 1) An introduction to cartographic language and preparation of simple maps; 2) An introduction to thematic cartography and databases focusing on narratives; 3) Training activities based on different sources: 4) A map production workshop.
12.30 – 14.00	Lunch
14.00 – 17.30	Historical GIS Tiago Gil (University of Pisa and University of Brasilia) Continuation of Historical GIS

Thursday June 22

09.00 – 12.30	Natural Language Processing methods Rachele Sprugnoli (University of Parma) The organization, analysis and dissemination of historical documents is strongly influenced by the ever-increasing proliferation of digitized historical sources. In particular, there is a growth of digital archives containing searchable texts in machine-readable format. On the one hand, this growth has facilitated access to historical documents, but on the other it has exposed historians to an overload of information. In this context, Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods and tools can help the analysis of historical texts at a lexical, grammatical, syntactic and semantic level as well as their exploration. The course will feature: (i) an introduction to NLP, its methods and main approaches; (ii) hands-on activities on some NLP tasks, such as lemmatization, part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, topic modelling.
12.30 – 14.00	Lunch
14.00 – 17.30	Natural Language Processing methods Rachele Sprugnoli (University of Parma) Continuation of Natural Language Processing methods