Digital humanities: some distinctive features

Rather than reporting on original research, this paper seeks to define the complex and rather diffuse domain of digital humanities by examining the historical and technological origins of the discipline. The distinction between the practice of the computer-mediated storage and retrieval of data relevant to human artefacts and the creative building of ‘digital culture’ draws a rough dividing line across the objectives of digital humanists. A historical outline of the distant origins of digital humanities suggests that the discipline is foundationally and intrinsically linked to computational linguistics and the development of linguistic resources. The boundaries of the discipline have been shifting concomitantly with the broadening of the scientific horizon and the evolution of dedicated technologies. Text mark-up (stemming from text annotation) and the multimodal facilities offered by ordinary browsers are the two basic techniques which have promoted the progressive development and expansion of digital humanities. These two techniques are closely interconnected as the language operated by the http protocol (HyperText Transfer Protocol) derives from the same source as that used for text mark-up. Hypertext and multimodality allow extending the uses of the computer to store and access humanities data of various kinds, including images, videos and sound recordings. Finally, the declaration of entities, as a further development of mark-up, makes it possible to apply semantic web techniques to carry out advanced research studies. The field of creative digital culture is very large, and there are abundant software applications that support such creative pursuits. Consequently, several forms of art have largely profited from technological advancement. Given this, the paper also addresses technological obsolescence as a serious problem in digital humanities.

The figure of ‟Polish refugee ” in Italian literary fiction. Edmondo de Amicis and Edoardo Albinati in search of a modern myth

The paper offers a contextual reflection on how the ‘Polish refugee’ figure is rendered in two examples of 19th- and 20th-century Italian literature. The paper opens with a brief discussion of the term ‘myth’ and its meanings in the age of Digital Humanities and proceeds to outline the literary and non-literary sources of the European myth of Poles as victims of foreign violence. Having given some attention to Edmondo de Amicis’s early poems addressing the 1863 uprising in Poland, the argument then focuses on his short story ‘Profughi polacchi’ (1863) as establishing the pattern of representing Polish emigrants in modern literature. Subsequently, the ways in which this narrative pattern changes in Edoardo Albinati’s novel Polacco lavatore di vetri (1998) are analysed to show that the idealised vision of the ‘refugee’ collapses. In conclusion, the dynamics of the presence and productivity of the myth in literature and in journalism are emphasised, and the differences in the handling of the myth in these two forms of writing are highlighted.

The aim of this paper is to describe a genre that is gaining importance in contemporary humanities, and especially in its areas devoted to digital media – the technical report. Technical reports are discussed as part of the larger trend of open notebook science. This form of communication draws from experiences worked out in the field of technology, computer science and science. In this understanding technical reports are a genre of gray literature, a form dedicated to communicating results of research projects conducted by laboratories. The case study discussed in this text is devoted to a series of technical reports from the MIT Trope Tank lab, which are interpreted in the light of a manifestotext for this form of communication, Beyond the Journal and the Blog. The Technical Report for Communication in the Humanities, published by Nick Montfort. One of the aims of the article is also to contextualize technical reports against the background of other forms and methods of communication in laboratories from the field of contemporary humanities (including blogs, brochures, lab notebooks).