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.

PTTB and DiTMAO: the modularity of some tools for digital humanities

For several years now, computational linguistics has been addressing the problems of and developing technological tools for automatic translation, with its important economic implications. At the same time, projects dedicated to facilitating translations of ancient works, which are often fraught with considerable hermeneutical difficulties, are far rarer. The PTTB system, which was designed and constructed at the Institute for Computational Linguistics (National Research Council) in Pisa, enables a group of about fifty scholars to translate the entire Babylonian Talmud, written in Aramaic and Biblical Hebrew, more quickly and uniformly. While the language and structure of the textual corpus made the development of machine translation algorithms impossible, translation memory and edit distance techniques have produced excellent results. Based on them, the system offers scholars a high percentage of correct translations, accessible through a very intuitive graphic user interface. The results are easily exportable to xml files suitable for the final editing and printing operations. So far, these innovations have made it possible to publish four treatises in six printed volumes with translations, annotations and thematic indexes within a relatively short time. Several other volumes have already been processed and are currently being edited. Various perspectives open up for the use of the digital Talmud in Italian. One of the most interesting options involves using machine learning and named entity recognition techniques to associate semantic or conceptual values (Talmud Ontological Framework) with and make cross-references among portions of the text that report or discuss similar themes. This will help various groups of (general and specialised) users to browse this vast and heterogeneous textual archive on the semantic basis. The strategy adopted here is also aligned with the Dictionnaire des Termes Médico-botaniques de l’Ancien Occitan (DiTMAO), another ongoing lexicographical project. It will enable users to semantically navigate within an extensive medical-pharmaceutical and botanical textual corpus in medieval Occitan. For these reasons, PTTB and DiTMAO can be regarded as two instances of one innovative technological infrastructure for linguistic and philological research in the field of digital humanities.