84211 - Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (1) (LM)

Course contents

The course wants to initiate to digital humanities with a special focus on languages, models, tools and infrastructures for the enhancement of cultural heritage: literary texts, archive documents, bibliographic material and museum objects.

The course will be organized on three macro areas:

1. Analysis of the main transversal tools in DH: WWW (protocol, addressing, languages); Formal languages for the representation of semi-structured data (XML and schema); The semantic web and the linked open data (Semantic Web Stack - URIs, RDFs and ontologies); Data display systems (HTML + CSS and information architecture principles); The interface design (web page elements and browsing systems).
2. Study of the DH domain through the main research areas, but with a special focus on: digital scholarship and textual editing; Digital libraries, archives and museums. In particular, projects will be analyzed to enucleate the specific features of the process of building a digital resource in the DH domain.
3. Classification of the main standards for the description of cultural heritage resources, and related ontologies, in the context of: resource dissemination (Dublin Core); Description of literary texts (TEI); Archival description (ISAD / EAD; ISAAR / EAC; RiC); Bibliographic description (ISBD, FRBR, MODS/Bibframe); Museum management (CIDOC-CRM).

Readings/Bibliography

A suggested reading, before the start of the course, is:
A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. <http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/>. In particular chapters: 1, 14, 16, 17, 22, 31.

Further readings will be proposed and discussed during the lessons.

In detail some Web resources will be used:

1. for languages:

• • TEI - <http://www.tei-c.org>; <http://teibyexample.org/>
  • XML - <https://www.w3schools.com/xml/>
  • DC - <https://www.dublincore.org/specifications/dublin-core/dcmi-terms/>
  • HTML, CSS, progettazione e interfaccia - <https://www.w3schools.com>; <https://www.codecademy.com/>

2. for DH projects and journals:
DH PROJECTS
Projects using the TEI: <http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/Projects/ >
EADH projects: <http://eadh.org/projects>

DH JOURNALS
Journal of DH - <http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/ >
DHQ - <http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/ >
DSH - <https://academic.oup.com/dsh > (via proxy)
TEI journal - <https://journal.tei-c.org/journal/index >

3. for Standards:
Jenn Riley, Seeing Standards: A Visualization of the Metadata Universe, copy 2009-10, <http://jennriley.com/metadatamap/ >.

W3C Incubator Group Report, Library Linked Data Incubator Group: Datasets, Value Vocabularies, and Metadata Element Sets. 25 October 2011, <https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/XGR-lld-vocabdataset-20111025/ >.


Italian standard in LAM (Libraries, Archives and Museums):

• ICCU, ICCD, ICAR, ICOM

Teaching methods

Lessons;
Seminars;
Online tools;
Software analysis.

Assessment methods

The assessment will be based on:

1. Design of a digital Web resource in the DH domain, with particular reference to the description of: architectural model (interface) and content (objective of the resource and type of data); descriptive standards; access methods (browsing systems and services). The project will be summarized in a maximum of 5 slides and presented in a maximum of 10 minutes.
2. Creation of a prototype of a Web resource for cultural heritage that reuses all the technologies discussed (HTML5, CSS, XML, authorities, standards for cultural heritage [at least DC and TEI]), applying them to a practical case. The presentation of the resource must take place in maximum 10 minutes.
   

In addition to these activities, non-attending students are also required to discuss the chapters of the books indicated in the bibliography. Students who attend at least 75% of the lessons are considered to be attending.

Evaluation will be based on the following parameters: timing (0-3 points); adequacy of the design (0-6 points); correctness of implementation (0-6 points); awareness of formal languages (0-8 points); technical lexicon (0-7 points); proposal of original solutions (for laude).

Teaching tools

Classes are held in a classroom equipped with personal computers connected to the Intranet and Internet.

Students who require specific services and adaptations to teaching activities due to a disability or specific learning disorders (SLD), must first contact the appropriate office: https://site.unibo.it/studenti-con-disabilita-e-dsa/en/for-students.

Office hours

See the website of Francesca Tomasi