Digital Humanities: alcuni tratti caratteristici

• Authors: Ferrari Giacomo

Title variants

EN

Digital Humanities: Some Distinctive Features

• Languages of publication: IT

Abstracts

IT

Questo articolo non presenta una ricerca originale, ma è piuttosto un tentativo di definire questo settore scientifico così complesso e piuttosto sfumato, facendo anche ricorso alle sue radici storiche e tecnologiche. Una prima linea di distinzione degli obiettivi di questa disciplina consiste nell’opposizione tra tecniche per memorizzare e recuperare mediante calcolatore dati rilevanti agli artefatti umani e la costruzione creativa di una “cultura digitale”. Un breve ricostruzione storica delle prime origini delle "digital humanities", fa supporre una connessione con la linguistica computazionale e con lo sviluppo delle risorse linguistiche come fondamenti della disciplina. I confini della disciplina sono evoluti con l’ampliarsi degli orizzonti scientifici e l’evoluzione delle tecnologie dedicate. Le tecnologie di base che rendono possibile lo sviluppo di aree più vaste di Digital Humanities sono due, l’annotazione testuale, con il conseguente "markup", e le capacità multimediali offerte dai browser ordinari. Queste due tecniche sono strettamente legate, dal momento che il linguaggio che è utilizzato dal protocollo http (HyperText Transfer Protocol) ha origine comune con quello che viene utilizzato nel markup testuale. Ipertestualità e multimodalità permettono l’estensione dell’uso del computer nella memorizzazione e recupero di materiali umanistici di tipo diverso, includendo immagini, video e suoni. Alla fine, un ulteriore sviluppo del "markup", cioè la dichiarazione delle entities, ha reso possibile l’uso di tecniche di semantic web per condurre ricerche avanzate. Il campo della cultura digitale creativa è vastissimo e la quantità di software disponibili per rendere possibile questa creatività è enorme; alcune forme di arte ne hanno largamente tratto vantaggio. Nella conclusione si discute il serio problema dell’obsolescenza tecnologica.

EN

Rather than reporting on original research, this paper seeks to define the complex and rather diffuse domain of digital humanities by examining the historical and technological origins of the discipline. The distinction between the practice of the computer-mediated storage and retrieval of data relevant to human artefacts and the creative building of ‘digital culture’ draws a rough dividing line across the objectives of digital humanists. A historical outline of the distant origins of digital humanities suggests that the discipline is foundationally and intrinsically linked to computational linguistics and the development of linguistic resources. The boundaries of the discipline have been shifting concomitantly with the broadening of the scientific horizon and the evolution of dedicated technologies. Text mark-up (stemming from text annotation) and the multimodal facilities offered by ordinary browsers are the two basic techniques which have promoted the progressive development and expansion of digital humanities. These two techniques are closely interconnected as the language operated by the http protocol (HyperText Transfer Protocol) derives from the same source as that used for text mark-up. Hypertext and multimodality allow extending the uses of the computer to store and access humanities data of various kinds, including images, videos and sound recordings. Finally, the declaration of entities, as a further development of mark-up, makes it possible to apply semantic web techniques to carry out advanced research studies. The field of creative digital culture is very large, and there are abundant software applications that support such creative pursuits. Consequently, several forms of art have largely profited from technological advancement. Given this, the paper also addresses technological obsolescence as a serious problem in digital humanities.

Keywords

IT

digital humanities; linguistica computazionale; risorse linguistiche; markup; tecnologia per le scienze umane

EN

digital humanities; computational linguistics; linguistic resources; mark-up; technology for humanities

• Publisher: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek
• Journal: Italica Wratislaviensia
• Year: 2020
• Issue: 11.1
• Pages: 11-29

Dates

published

2020-07-31

received

2020-01-25

accepted

2020-06-15

Contributors

author

Ferrari Giacomo

• Università del Piemonte Orientale “A. Avogadro” – Alessandria, Novara, Vercelli, Italy

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Identifiers

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.15804/IW.2020.11.1.01