Digital Humanities

Humanistic content is increasingly created digitally or transferred to digital medias. Production, conservation, analysis and maintenance of these contents represent a new challenge for the traditional humanistic areas confronted with digital technologies. Founded under the name of Humanities Computing, the science that deals with the linking of the human sciences and information technology is today generally known as Digital Humanities. The challenge of the future for the human sciences is to make all phases of research operational, from finding sources, to their analysis and to their critical reintegration into the knowledge network: technology therefore presents itself not only as an instrument, but also as a new structure of critical thought, of the individual and of the community. The Digital Humanities have a founding date and occasion: in 1946, Father Roberto Busa (Vicenza, 1913-Gallarate, 2011) had the idea of ​​digitizing (the support was then the punched cards) the linguistic index of the corpus of St. Thomas Aquinas. The work - of monumental proportions - was realized in collaboration with IBM (http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/it/). Since then, a lot of progress has been made, and the Digital Humanities have expanded to touch every field of humanistic knowledge: from digital archiving to computational linguistics, from infographics to teaching and gaming, in conjunction with the reflection on digital communication, economics, law and web marketing, digital art and all the philosophical methods related to the use of digital in "Studia Humanitatis".

 

Last update 9 February 2023