Informatica per le Digital Humanities

AI = artificial intelligence = AI is a subfield of Computer Science born in the 1950s in the US,

founded by a group of computer scientists with the aim of replicating and expanding activities

that are traditionally attributed to human beings (e.g. reasoning, conversations, creativity, etc.)

by means of computers.

Digital technology has entered our private aspects, even cultural aspects are affected =

significant role in creating literature/culture = (digital) humanities.

How does digital technology affect culture? To be more specific and closer to this very class:

how does digital technology affect humanities? You have two ways to tackle this question:

1) by ignoring digital technology and sticking to traditional, pre-computer-era ways of working

with humanities; the consequences of such approach are to be left out of everything that is

happening with digital technologies and culture out there, which would be a pity, and to be

accused of contradicting yourselves (after all, you are using digital technology while you are

reading this), which would put you in a very difficult position to defend.

2) by accepting the inevitable (and not necessarily positive) existence of digital technology and

getting ready to analyze its effects on humanities and culture; something is definitely

happening, and understanding what it is, or at least developing the conceptual tools to try and

understand what it is, is a very enriching experience that will make you a better scholar,

professional, person in the humanities.

When it comes to literature, we can consider it as before the computer era, or see it as something

created with the support of computer technology = need to know how devices work to

understand how cultural products are created.

How do they intersect with humanities? In order to do so:

Definition of the term ‘digital humanities’ = no complete consensus on this

1. definition

2. Chronological development of this discipline

3. Methodological aspect, computer science VS humanities

Digital Humanities (DH) and questions:

There are different categories of questions, some are immutable in time (what’s your name?),

some exceptional event might change the answers (transition), but usually they stay fixed in

time. Another kind of question changes overtime and depends on the situation/context in which

⇒

its asked (how old are you?) for digital humanities this happens too, the answer depends on

how we understand DH, in every field there’s a different answer, it’s interdisciplinary.

In the English speaking world it’s a hot topic, however despite this success, only very few

scholars have tried to give a clear cut definition.

Questions that emerge when people ask about the nature of DH:

- What were, are and will be the humanities in western, and now world, culture?

- What is the role of the digital within the academy, in scholarly communication and

in the humanistic disciplines as a whole?

- Are the digital humanities a series of practical approaches?

- Are they a distinct discipline with its own set of standards, distinguished

researchers, hierarchies and rules of engagement?

- Is the term digital humanities a redundancy?

- Or has the arrival of the digital forever changed the way humanists work?

- Is technology determinate?

- What role does the solitary scholar have in a digital environment that is increasingly

collaborative?

Attempts at defining DH:

· Wikipedia (from Gardiner and Musto)

o Digital humanities is an area of research and teaching at the intersection of

computing and the disciplines of the humanities. Developing from the fields

of humanities computing, humanistic computing, and digital humanities

praxis, digital humanities embraces a variety of topics, from curating online

collections to data mining large cultural data sets. Digital Humanities (often

abbreviated DH) currently incorporates both digitized and born-digital

materials and combines the methodologies from traditional humanities

disciplines (such as history, philosophy. Linguistics, literature, art,

archeology, music, and cultural studies) and social sciences with tools

provided by computing (such as data visualization, information retrieval,

data mining, statistics, text mining, digital mapping) and digital publishing.

It's a clear-cut, simple and normative definition.

· Burdick, Drucker and Schnapp

o Digital humanities asks what it means to be a human being in the networked

information age and to participate in fluid communities of practice, asking

and answering research questions that cannot be reduced to a single genre,

medium, discipline, or institution… it is a global, trans-historical, and

transmedial approach to knowledge and meaning-making

The sharp contrast between the two approaches demonstrates the contested nature of the term,

its ambiguous nature depending on point of views.

Perhaps this will be solved eventually by reestablishing the digital humanities and humanities

computing as two different areas, each with its own perspective, methodologies, fields of

investigations and tools.

According to this definition, we are dealing with an encounter between 2 different entities.

Interview to Schnapp on computational method:

Trying to define something = find a universal framework in which we can adapt all these

instances.

Schnapp tells it doesn’t matter at all whether we’re not able to come up with a universal

definition of DH because it’s the humanities themselves that don’t have a precise definition.

It’s the works and masterpieces that are significant when it comes to DH = it’s fine for him to

not have a prevalence scheme in which we can adapt, what matters are exceptions, we have to

it’s okay not to

be able to keep an open mind. Since cultural endeavors are full of exceptions,

have a fixed definition.

“And those are 2 very different sets of questions, and they have strong social and

· ethical and historiographical implications. They’re not going to make the same

assumptions, they’re not going to ask the same questions, and they’re probably not

going to use the same tools”.

Video on what is digital humanities:

Different professors at Harvard answered, showing an enhancement for their disciplines thanks

to technology = it is substituting? Or enhancing? Or giving new ways? Are these news things

still part of this discipline? The basic intuition comes first from the knowledge a scholar has,

technology is used as a tool, it distributes the findings, but the data come from discoveries in

the different disciplines = still a mixture, computers can show wonderful things but are

and it’s a limit on the part of technology. It’s not

basically data gathered in different ways,

always about creating new information, but creating new experience from it.

Key words quoted:

à Clear pleasure

à Information data

à Computational analysis

à Interdisciplinary

à Collaborative, connections, designers are at the center of the network

à Broader range of material

à Perceive changing

à Media history in history

à Metadata network analysis

The term "Digital Humanities." "Digital" is an adjective and "Humanities" is a noun. Simple

as that, but it hasn’t always been this way. The field was previously known as "humanities

computing", closer to the Italian expression "informatica umanistica", which is still adopted in

some textbooks in Italian. The terminological change from "humanities computing" to "digital

humanities" is attributed to John Unsworth, Susan Schreibman, and Ray Siemens, editors of

the anthology A Companion to Digital Humanities (2004).

Is this different definition a change of paradigm in this kind of studies?

DH = intersection difficult to define but that allows new experiences

- We can use the methods of contemporary humanities in studying digital objects

- We use digital technology in studying traditional humanities objects

Each interpretation leads to very different theories and practices, they both are correct and

needs to be expanded.

From a metaphorical chromatic point of view, we have to consider this intersection, the

relationship in between, even if not so clear cut as a defined color, as the real identity of this

research field.

However, whatever the gradient that characterizes this intersection, if we have to consider the

and languages, let’s start from the top with

two terms separately, with their own methodologies

DIGITAL.

We are facing a MEASURABLE world, made of signals and computing.

But the adjective DIGITAL, for a humanistic scholar, and specifically for an art historian could

sound in a different way, in particular with regards to the paradigm of the Image and, of course,

of a digital image.

DIGITAL: “I will argue against the traditional chasm between the ‘analog’ and the ‘digital’

· showing that not only the 2 technologies aren’t in opposition, but they coexist, and

that digital technology is predominant because it allows for easier storage and

transmission of data, which lead to 2 key aspects: memory and connectivity.

Digital signals are much easier to store and transmit over long distances than analog

signals, this is the key difference that determined the success of digital technology over

analog, it is a matter of practicality rather than an actual ontological distinction: most

systems now rely on digital signals because they are less affected by disturbances and

this makes them easier to store and to transmit over long distances than analog signals.

Another success factor for digital memories derives from the versatility of the binary

code, which enables computer designers to easily create encodings, that is,

mathematical correspondences between finite sequences of 0s and 1s and entities in the

physical world. This was the great intuition that brought digital memories to the centre

stage of computer science mid-20th century: the possibility to store not only the data

to elaborate, but also the instructions by which such data were to be elaborated.

Thus, digital memories with the stored program concept allowed, for the first time in

the history of technology, for the storage of data and the operations to perform on those

data. This was the birth of automated iteration, that is, the possibility to program a

machine to perform complex sequences of different operations.

The technical advancements between the 1990s and the 2010s in terms of the contents

that a browser can show are obvious: in little more than a decade we go from text and

digital photographs to fullfledged videos, superpositions of computer-generated

graphics and photos, computer-generated graphics interacting with user-generated

drawings on the fly, and so on. These enhancements, which are theoretically made

possible by the digitisation of the contents, are made practically feasible by the

technological evolution of digital devices, comprised of circuits that are every year

more miniaturised and denser with transistors, which increases the number of operations

that a computer is able to perform per unit of time.” (Verdicchio 2018)

= How digital technology enhances cultural experiences + what does it means to do art with

digital technology + what does it mean for something to be digital.

Questions on DH:

To what extent do we acquire knowledge through images? How does the memory establish

itself from images, manipulate them, “archive” them and recycle them?

What are the differences between the ways we perceive, feel about and remember (1) a

landscape, (2) a painting of that landscape, (3) a photo of the landscape, and (4) a photo of the

painting?

Can they be measured or described in neurophysiological terms as well as in terms of cultural

history? – –

Do the two approaches the neurophysiological and the historical lead to comparable and

perhaps convergent results, or is there no one-to-one correspondence between them?

But now, in our ‘digital turn’ it’s necessary to add the day-by-day

⇒ digital world, and so:

What are the differences between the ways we perceive, feel about and remember

(1) a landscape, (2) a digital photo of that landscape, (3) a digital photo of a painting of that

landscape, and (4) looking at an animation of them in 3D, Virtual Reality and Augmented

Reality? Can they be measured or described in physiological terms as well as in terms of

cultural history?

Starting from these new assumptions, the term “Digital” is more than a technical question.

So, even if the adjective DIGITAL is in some way referring to something measurable and

predictable, now we arrive in another world that is NOT SO MEASURABLE and probably

NOT SO PREDICTABLE. We are going to the bottom part of the topic: HUMANITIES.

This state of indeterminacy could derive from the fact that we are talking about humanities,

like Gardiner et al. outline in chapter 2:

“Humanities study the world created by humanity. Humanists study human culture

· as created and manifested IN and BY individuals as opposed to the natural world or

patterns on human society”.

the broad

It’s only a part of the real world model, with physical and social sciences, but it is nevertheless

a significant part with its own particular identity.

It is a type of study always anchored to the materiality of the objects investigated, be they

books, artistic objects, sounds, or any other source. It’s a founding principle for Humanities,

digital or not.

Furthermore, to be examined, objects must be placed in relation to each other, in relation to a

context, even if only to establish an autograph, a date, a reason why, a meaning.

Could you imagine the necessary effort to establish the five Ws (I mean What Who, When,

Where, Why) of an unknown and anonymous object?

And then how would we have to manipulate the body of evidence investigated? Because we

have to select, communicate, use for a contemporary meaning, and it’s obvious to any scholar

that the universe of facts, events and materials that we study can never be presented in its

entirety. It’s beyond any doubt that “all humanistic communication is only a representation of

a world irretrievably past and lost to full understanding” (Gardiner, Musto, 2015, p.19) and,

impossible to recreate fully.

HUMANITIES: = we don’t care too much about rules, it’s

Exceptions vs rules good to have exceptions,

because art is made mostly of exceptions.

– = present objects that don’t exist anymore thanks to digital technology, not

Re presentation

to touch but to experience as visual.

Do you remember Schnapp’s talk? The exceptions instead

⇒ of the rules, and then the

impossibility of exactly recreating the world one studies. A REPRESENTATION ONLY, in

the etymological sense of re-presentation, to make something present (again), to see something

once again. “Seeing” should not be here interpreted as mere subjectivity, it depends on the

scientific rigor of the methodology, on experimental sources and data analysis, on argumented

developing of a conclusion, based on proved assumptions.

If DIGITAL belongs to the hard sciences, formerly known as “exact sciences”, with

HUMANITIES we are dealing with soft sciences, but not at all less accurate.

Returning to the problem of humanities studies.

Here’s an Italian quotation, in which the key point is the meaning, the provenance and the year.

A soft manner to reflect:

“Sono invece scienze morbide nelle quali il percorso è più importante del punto di

· arrivo, cioè fuor di metafora, nelle quali il contributo più interessante non è quello

che scopre cose nuove, bensì quello che anche senza aggiungere niente

all’inventario del noto, apre nuove prospettive sulle cose, ci fa pensare ai problemi

a cui non avevamo mai pensato o dimostra inadeguato un risultato che si pensava

sostituirlo con uno nuovo” (Giunta 2017)

acquisito senza necessariamente

Hard science VS soft science

Probably the process instead of the results or, rather, I would suggest, the process WITH the

results, is more intriguing.

Hard sciences or soft sciences? Probably AND instead of OR, we are no longer faced with a

contrast of two cultures.

Stem or STEAM? The new acronym “Science Technology Engineering Art and Mathematics”

is really significant. It’s a rebirth of Humanities in a digital era. And it’s an intriguing one.

Scott Hartley first heard the terms 'fuzzy' and 'techie' while studying political science at

Stanford University. If you had majored in the humanities or social sciences, you were a fuzzy.

If you had majored in the computer sciences, you were a techie. Scott Hartly, a Google venture

capitalist, has written a brilliant book in 2017, concerning the revaluation of Liberal Arts in the

Digital World:

The fuzzy and the techie: why liberal arts will rule the digital world.

It seems that now managing data with high profits requires ethics, sense, questions, issues,

more than bare technical solutions.

It finally seems that also humanists can find not only a job, but also well paid one!

Regardless of whether it is true or not, what is notable is the revaluation of the necessity of a

discipline concerning the interaction of human beings and their unpredictable behaviors.

Now probably the intelligence of techies and fuzzies depends on the degree of uncertainty they

can face together. The DH are a good meeting point.

DH HISTORY

The earliest examples of what we now call digital humanities were placed under the name of

“computational humanities”, “computing and the humanities”, “humanities informatics”.

And so in the course of many decades, as we have said before, the terms evolve, but at the very

core of these efforts, until now and foreseeably in the future, there is a conversation between

computational techniques, technologies and platforms on the one side, and the kinds of

questions that characterize the humanities disciplines on the other.

We can talk of a DH History because there is an official engagement between the Humanities

and Computational Scienc