Vorträge: Der italienische Beitrag zu den Digital Humanities

Am 6. November 2018 finden an der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig Vorträge zum Themenfeld Digital Humanities statt. Diese sind Teil der Vortragsreihe "Digital Humanities – Theorie und Methodik" des Instituts für Romanistik an der Universität Leipzig unter Federführung von Prof. Elisabeth Burr und finden mit Unterstützung der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig statt. Interessenten sind herzlich willkommen.

VORTRÄGE

17.00–18.30 Uhr
Fabio Ciotti (Università di Roma Tor Vergata): From ‘Informatica Umanistica’ to Digital Humanities and return: the methodological foundations of the Italian tradition in Digital Humanities and their contribution to the evolution of the field

18.30–20.00 Uhr
Maurizio Lana (Università del Piemonte Orientale): Past and present of the use of computers for the analysis of texts

ABSTRACTS

From ‘Informatica Umanistica’ to Digital Humanities and return: the methodological foundations of the Italian tradition in Digital Humanities and their contribution to the evolution of the field

The talk will trace a history of the Italian tradition in DH, concentrating in particular on the so-called Roman school, whose intellectual and methodological legacy is particularly relevant in this moment. Usual historical accounts of DH indicate in the figure of Father Busa the initiator of the field. However, the work of Father Busa was not at all isolated in Italy. From the 50s and 60s of the last century the Italian "proto-DH" landscape was, in fact, very lively. But it is especially in the 80's that, thanks to Tito Orlandi and his group, a new domain of scholarship called "Informatica Umanistica" emerges and consolidates. The peculiarity of this tradition resides in its mainly theoretical and methodological view of the intersection between computing and humanities. Hence the relevance given to the foundational issues of formalization, modelling and encoding and the thoughtful consideration of the foundations of computation (Turing machine, formal languages, logic and classical Artificial Intelligence). The divergence between this view of DH and the "Big tent" approach which is mainstream in the Anglo-American (and then global) tradition is evident.

Past and present of the use of computers for the analysis of texts

The talk will look at how over time software for searching text inside texts has evolved. This type of (re)search constitutes the entry point of computers into the world of textuality in the broad sense. This type of research is responsible in various ways for the crisis of the traditional ways of studying texts based on the interpretive ability of the scholar, which remains implicit and is not documented at all.

KONTAKT

Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Burr
Institut für Romanistik
Universität Leipzig
http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~burr