Introduction to the School

Vittore Casarosa (ISTI-CNR and University of Pisa)

Public History

Enrica Salvatori (University of Pisa)
The digital revolution has had a profound impact on how nowadays history is studied, analyzed, shared, taught as well as on how the sources, that document each feature of the past, are published, preserved and even produced. Alongside the traditional methodology, transformed by the digital, new public scenarios have been created, where simple citizens (communities, groups, parties, associations) participate in the “writing” of history, that is in the different ways in which it is written, told, lived and shared.
This presents real challenges to academic history and in the same time open new work scenarios. The lesson will highlight the main consequences that digital change has led to the profession of the historian. The participants will be asked to build the main structure of a crowdsourcing project about the history of a town.

Natural Language Processing

Rachele Sprugnoli (FBK – Bruno Kessler Foundation)
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary field whose goal is to create machines that understand natural languages. NLP applied to Humanities disciplines helps in dealing with large amount of data, extracting information and finding relationships and patterns between words.
The lesson will feature: (i) an introduction to the main areas of research within the field; (ii) hands-on activities on some NLP tasks, such as lemmatization, part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, topic modelling and keyword extraction.

Tools for text analysis and visualization

Rachele Sprugnoli (FBK – Bruno Kessler Foundation)
Data visualization can be combined with the analysis of texts to support the exploration, investigation and dissemination of humanities data.
After an introduction on the application of data visualization in the area of Digital Humanities and on the concept of distant reading, we will carry on hands-on activities using tools such as RAW Graphs, Voyant and Gephi.

Methods and tools for digital philology

Roberto Rosselli Del Turco (University of Torino and University of Pisa)
Digital philology is a fairly recent discipline aiming at applying ICT methods and tools to the textual criticism area. Quite a number of new digital editions have been published during the last twenty years or so. Many of these editions, however, are achieved by programming and configuring complex frameworks, within the reach of medium-large research groups only. Encoding the edition texts in the TEI XML format allows the individual scholar to prepare a digital edition, but the on-line publication and navigation of such a site still remain a complicated and potentially expensive operation.
EVT (Edition Visualization Technology) is an open source tool whose purpose is to allow the scholar to publish TEI-based editions in an easy way, making available to the end user an user-friendly user interface and several research tools. This course will introduce the subject of digital philology, of text encoding using the TEI standard and a “hands one” final part when students will be able to experiment with EVT.

Digital editorship

Nicoletta Salvatori (University of Pisa)
The ebook revolution is over, the major battles have been fought and won, and the ebook is here not only to stay but to evolve. This may sound like a very plain statement, but being able to understand the trend in the ebook market will make many of the issues of creating ebooks a bit easier.
An ebook isn’t only a digital file for reading flowing text on a digital device. Now you can read different kind of ebooks made for different markets and targets on different devices. You can have a liquid layout or a fixed layout, you can have multimediality and interactivity and even the graphic elegance once reserved to an art book or to a photographic hard cover book. The ebook is more and more shareable, social and flexible with even the possibility to become an audiobook at next to no expense. And the most important thing is that all of this is on everybody reach, thanks to new and powerful softwares.
Ready to try to create an ebook?

Ontologies for Digital Humanities

Timothy Tambassi (University of Bucarest)
In the wake of the birth and development of the so-called Semantic Web, ontologies have recently received new attention. The main idea behind the Semantic Web is that of extending the classical Web to a “Web of Data”, in which the meaning of such data, their semantics, and the information resources designed and built for human fruition are “understandable” for artificial agents. In this context, ontologies represent the most important toolkit for describing data meaning.
All this considered, the lecture will explore: 1) definitions, assumptions and features of ontology; 2) the increasing diffusion of this kind of software in Digital Humanities; 3) some examples of ontologies (specifically focused on the domain of Geography). Finally, the participants will be asked to sketch an ontology suitable for describing the city where they live.

Introduction to Semantic Web

Carlo Meghini (ISTI-CNR)
The lecture will introduce the Semantic Web vision and its main languages: RDF, OWL and SPARQL, and the main technologies that can currently be used to support information systems centered on those languages. In the process, it will highlight the role that the Semantic Web languages and technologies can play for the Digital Humanities, with particular emphasis on ontologies. As an illustration, two on-going projects on Dante Alighieri’s primary sources and on the usage of formal narratives in Digital Libraries will be presented.

Digital maps and Geographical Information Systems

Augusto Ciuffoletti (University of Pisa)
Digital Cartography is a key tool for rendering, teaching, or documenting historical facts. During this session we introduce the foundations of GIS, the basic concepts and terminology, and next we proceed to understand how to use these powerful tools.
We start from GIS applications installed on a personal computer, and proceed to web portals that provide GIS as a service, allowing to publish and share maps. Bring your PC with you to have an hands-on experience of GIS in the Web.

Acquisition of digital resources through OCR

Federico Boschetti (ILC-CNR)
Techniques to extract texts from digital images through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) will be illustrated. The open source software ScanTailor, Tesseract-ocr, OCRopy and CoPhiProofReader will be installed for the lab activities.
The work-flow from the image pre-processing, through the OCR on the images of printed editions (or the ICR on manuscripts), to the post-processing to improve the accuracy of the automated recognition and the collaborative manual corrections on the web will be explained and tested during the lab activities.

Wrap-up and end of School