Digital Humanities (2019/2020)

Learning outcomes

The course aims to present students with knowledge on the tools and techniques at the foundation of Digital Humanities, in particular about digital scholarly editions and computational analysis of texts. At the end of the course students: - will know the main phases of the realization of a digital scholarly edition, and will acquire the practical skills to encode humanistic texts; - will know the main tasks for the automatic processing of written text, and will be able to use some of the main tools that support them; - will know the main methodologies and tools for the computational analysis of texts, and will be able to apply them to textual examples to be analyzed.

Introduction to Digital Humanities
Introduction to Computer Science: Information Theory, Algorithms and Languages, Computer architecture
Internet & Web
Web page creation: HTML & CSS
XML Metalanguage
Digital Humanities and Philology: Digital Scholarly Edition [Dr. Anna Cappellotto]
TEI and text encoding
OCR: Optical Character Recognition [Dr. Stefano Bazzaco]
RegEx: Regular Expressions and their usage
Natural Language Processing
Distant reading: Introduction and usage of Voyant
Sentiment Analysis for Distant Reading [Dr. Simone Rebora]
Stylometry [Dr. Simone Rebora]

Materials and resources will be given out during the course to support the lessons, and will be uploaded on the course's Moodle page.
In addition to the suggested textbook, the following resources are recommended as supplementary materials:

- Topic: Digital Humanities and Philology: Digital Scholarly Edition

Patrick Sahle, “What is a Scholarly Digital Edition?”, in E. Pierazzo & M. Driscoll (eds), Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories and Practices, Open Book Publishers 2016, pp. 19-40
URL: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/htmlreader/978-1-78374-238-7/ch2.xhtml

- Topic: TEI and text encoding

Open access video course "Digital Scholarly Editions" on the #dariahTeach teaching and training platform
URL: https://teach.dariah.eu/course/view.php?id=32

- Topic: OCR: Optical Character Recognition

David A. Smith, Ryan Cordell, A Research Agenda for Historical and Multilingual Optical Character Recognition, NULab – Northeastern University, 2018
URL: https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/downloads/neu:m043p093w?datastream_id=content

- Topic: Topic modelling & Stylometry

Fabio Ciotti. 2017. “Modelli e metodi computazionali per la critica letteraria: lo stato dell’arte.” In B. Alfonzetti, T. Cancro, V. Di Iasio, E. Pietrobon (a cura di). L’Italianistica oggi: ricerca e didattica. Roma: Adi editore, pp. 1-11.
URL: http://www.italianisti.it/upload/userfiles/files/Ciotti.pdf


For those interested in further exploring the topics of the course:

INFORMATICA UMANISTICA 2/ED
Marco Lazzari
McGraw-Hill, 2014
ISBN: 9788838668555
https://univr.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=alma990003784900205791&context=L&vid=39UVR_INST:39UVR_VU1&search_scope=Aleph_SP&tab=Aleph_slot&lang=it

Attendance and student contribution to class is strongly encouraged.
There is no difference in the program, materials and examination between attending and non-attending students

UPDATE: The exam is computer-based, and consists in filling a Moodle quiz on the day of the exam. For more details, Please check the "Modalità d'esame" document on the course's home-page on Moodle.