Digital Archaeology: From Interdisciplinarity to the ‘Fusion’ of Core Competences Towards the Consolidation of New Research Areas

The aim of this article is to explore the interdisciplinary turn observed in the development of humanities computing, in terms of integration and fusion of expertise. The debate started with the Seminar on Discipline umanistiche e informatica. Il problema dell’integrazione, held in 1991 at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Moving backwards in time, already from the 1960s the role of ‘integration’ was at the heart of many interdisciplinary initiatives supported by the National Research Council of Italy and the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei as part of their coordinated efforts to promote scientific progress. Through a number of archaeological case studies pivoting around the Etruscan civilisation, it will be shown how over time archaeological computing, and its evolution towards digital archaeology, has found in GIS and multimedia systems a unitary platform on which methods and practice of data acquisition, analysis, interpretation, and communication can converge. The concept of ‘fusion’, however, is much more recent and responds to a global resource management model, which combines the methods of archaeology with the objectives of Heritage Science, along the research path that goes from field and laboratory investigation to the protection, enhancement and communication of cultural heritage.

Text Mining Islamic Law

Digital humanities has a venerable pedigree, stretching back to the middle of the twentieth century, but despite noteworthy pioneering contributions it has not become a mainstream practice in Islamic Studies. This essay applies humanities computing to the study of Islamic law. We analyze a representative corpus of works of Islamic substantive law (furūʿ al-fiqh) from the beginnings of Islamic legal jurisprudence to the early modern period (2nd/8th-13th/19th c.) using several computational tools and methods: text-reuse network analysis based on plain-text annotations and html tags, clustered frequency-based analysis, word clouds, and topic modeling. Applying machine-guided distant reading to Islamic legal texts over the longue-dureé, we study (1) the role of the Qurʾān, (2) patterns of normative qualifications (aḥkām), and (3) the distribution of topics in our corpus. In certain instances the analysis confirms claims made in the scholarly literature on Islamic law, in other instances it corrects such claims.

The Origin Myths of Computing in Historical Research

This chapter outlines the multiple origin myths of “digital” historical research, arguing that social science inspired cliometricians and linguistically inclined humanities computing scholars working on textual collections were both using computers from the mid-twentieth century, but with very different intellectual agendas and only occasionally crossing paths. With the rise of mass digitization in the 1990s, both groups inspired a new generation of “digital” historians who worked to unlock the potential of the newly digitized archives. Wrestling with practical and intellectual challenges ranging from poor-quality transcription to dealing with incomplete data, this group generated new knowledge and answered new questions such as “what do you do with a million books?” but were not necessarily contributing directly to the existing conversations of the historiography

Digital Humanities

The article offers a definition, overview, and assessment of the current state of digital humanities, particularly with regard to its actual and potential contribution to literary studies. It outlines the history of humanities computing and digital humanities, its evolution as a discipline, including its institutional development and outstanding challenges it faces. It also considers some of the most cogent critiques digital humanities has faced, particularly from North American-based literary scholars, some of whom have suggested it represents a threat to centuries-old traditions of humanistic inquiry and particularly to literary scholarship based on the tradition of close reading. The article shows instead that digital humanities approaches gainfully employed offer powerful new means of illuminating both context and content of texts, to assist with both close and distant readings, offering a supplement rather than a replacement for traditional means of literary inquiry. The digital techniques it discusses include stylometry, topic modeling, literary mapping, historical bibliometrics, corpus linguistic techniques, and sequence alignment, as well as some of the contributions that they have made. Further, the article explains how many key aspirations of digital humanities scholarship, including interoperability and linked open data, have yet to be realized, and it considers some of the projects that are currently making this possible and the challenges that they face. The article concludes on a slightly cautionary note: What are the implications of the digital humanities for literary study? It is too early to tell.

Reflections on the Development of Digital Humanities

Lecture presented to the Utrecht Conference of ADHO, 2018: my experience in the field of Humanities Computing/Digital Humanities, collocated in historical perspective, listing and briefly commenting what I have learned to be the essential theories which form our discipline. For this purpose, the fundamental disciplines are proposed, and their role in the discipline: computing theory, information and communication, formalization, algorithms and recursion; and, from humanities side, cybernetics, linguistics, semiotics, relational model, systems theory, modelization.

Fra ‘letterario’ e digitale

Father Roberto Busa is widely recognised as the founder of Humanities Computing (HC) because of his pioneering approach to text analysis, which paved the way for computational linguistics. Over the years, this early focus on linguistic analysis has evolved to include new ways of combining humanities with computing. Digital Humanities (DH) provide a common outlook that has a markedly methodological nature and an interdisciplinary focus. The aim of this paper is to review some of the key issues behind the shift from HC to DH, highlighting elements of continuity and/or change.

Poéticas liminales en el mundo contemporáneo: Creación y formación en humanidades digitales

Las humanidades digitales presentes en nuestros idearios educativos son el resultado de una tradición académica que remonta su origen a finales de los años cuarenta del siglo XX con los trabajos de Roberto Busa, pionero de la lingüística computacional y el desarrollo de la conocida como Humanities Computing. A partir de la revolución digital, caracterizada por los cambios radicales provocados por la computación y la tecnología de la comunicación durante -y después- de la segunda mitad del s. XX, se nos ofrece una oportunidad de superación de la idea de las “dos culturas científicas” propiciando la generación de proyectos híbridos que sobre la base de lo digital mezclen humanidades, ciencias sociales, ingenierías, y ciencias en su conjunto. La participación en múltiples culturas digitales –cultura de las pantallas, de lo oral, del remix, de lo visual, de lo transmedia, del prototipo y del diseño–, y universales (cultura derivada del software libre), contribuye a revitalizar el discurso y el papel social de las Humanidades en nuestro mundo contemporáneo.

The Origins of Humanities Computing and the Digital Humanities Turn

At its beginnings Humanities Computing was characterized by a primary interest in methodological issues and their epistemological background. Subsequently, Humanities Computing practice has been prevailingly driven by technological developments and the main concern has shifted from content processing to the representation in digital form of documentary sources. The Digital Humanities turn has brought more to the fore artistic and literary practice in direct digital form, as opposed to a supposedly commonplace application of computational methods to scholarly research. As an example of a way back to the original motivations of applied computation in the humanities, a formal model of the interpretive process is here proposed, whose implementation may be contrived through the application of data processing procedures typical of the so called artificial adaptive systems.