Digital Humanities hosts an ongoing discussion about the relevance of this new field of studies in the history of philosophy and science, focusing on questions, tips, and practices to engage proactively with the many tools offered by the digital humanities.
By Celeste Pedro
To start off the new academic year, I’m sharing Smarthistory, Centre for Public Art History, a nonprofit online resource created in 2003 by Dr Beth Harris and Dr Steven Zucker, both from the Khan Academy. The platform now hosts over 4,000 essays and 1,000 videos, covering works from ancient Mesopotamia to contemporary art. The entire library is free and openly licensed (Creative Commons), making it widely reusable for educators and students.
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By Celeste Pedro
I have always been passionate about old books and old scripts. That led me to study many subjects beyond my major, and get to know many online repositories of the most amazing collections. To keep track of developments in digitisation efforts, I follow many Facebook pages set up by Unis, research centres, research projects, museums, libraries, specialists, etc.
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By Celeste Pedro
January 2025 – Philosophical games are not easy to find. Today, I bring you one that has been released very recently. You might ask what this has to do with the digital humanities, but please indulge with me in the fact that it has been released open-access, in digital form, and that that’s the least of its contribution to knowledge dissemination.
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By Katharina Hillmann
December 2024 – One of the problems with critical editions is that they often require prioritizing a single version—whether it be a particular manuscript or the editor’s own rendition—in an effort to reconstruct what is believed to be the original text. However, this approach does not accurately reflect how people historically engaged with texts, as texts were circulated in multiple versions, which served as the foundation for various commentaries and translations.
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By Celeste Pedro
November 2024 – Our readers might already familiar with the europeana.eu database, developed and maintained by the Europeana Foundation, the Europeana Network Association, and the Europeana Aggregators’ Forum for the past 15 years. If you’re not, there are good reasons to get to know this massive Initiative for the digital transformation pertaining to cultural heritage.
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By Celeste Pedro
September 2024 – Have you ever heard about the “Research Catalogue”? It’s an international database for artistic research developed by the Society for Artistic Research (SAR), Amsterdam. It provides students, researchers and teachers with a platform for publication and outreach, and it includes various other features, such as a personal repository or applications management modules.
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By Celeste Pedro
Summer 2024 – Did you know that many of our libraries’ holdings are fragments? And that fragments are sometimes the only witness we have on important ancient works, enabling us to shed light on lost texts? Fragmentarium is an online platform that works as a collaborative hub for the study of manuscript fragments. Having started as part of e-codices – Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland, its scope is now international. Currently holding 6347 fragments, the Fragmentarium database is extremely well-curated; from the detailed descriptions (that can be downloaded in TEI/XML) to its “refined search” options, this website is easy to navigate and visually sober.
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By Celeste Pedro
May 2024 – Digital Libraries are now a common thing. Almost every major Public Library has at least part of its collections digitised. Efforts and standards for digital preservation and accessibility have been decades now. Nevertheless, it’s incredible how much is still to be done. Countless fonds are waiting in line for their turn, and the attack against the British Library has revealed how fragile the system can be. Accessing, using and writing about these digital fonds and their corpus is also a way of preserving heritage and transmitting knowledge about them. This month, we’ll briefly present some new digitisation projects that many scholars will surely welcome in the coming years.
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By Celeste Pedro
Abril 2024 – O panorama das Humanidades Digitais em Portugal centra-se maioritariamente no desenvolvimento de projetos financiados de investigação e desenvolvimento. Em termos de formação, há apenas algumas ofertas ao nível de mestrado, poucas unidades curriculares nas licenciaturas, e alguns ocasionais workshops e cursos breves, iniciativas geralmente associadas a Laboratórios ou Grupos de Investigação, como na Universidade de Coimbra, ou na Universidade de Évora. Em Lisboa existe o Mestrado em Curadoria e Humanidades Digitais da NOVA FCSH e FCT NOVA, e no norte do país, o Mestrado em Humanidades Digitais da Escola de Letras, Artes e Ciências Humanas da Universidade do Minho.Na Universidade do Porto surgiu este ano letivo (2023/24) um curso de formação contínua que procura colmatar esta falta de oferta formativa e melhorar o acesso dos estudantes a novos recursos digitais. Agora que a primeira edição do Programa de formação em Humanidades Digitais se encontra na recta final, a IPM entrevistou três alunas que partilharam como foi passar por esta experiência formativa, para tentar perceber o que procuram os alunos dentro desta grande área do conhecimento.
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By Celeste Pedro
March 2024 – It is already evident that we cannot do without the advantages of digital tools and methodologies for scholarly analysis, exploration, and scientific dissemination. And the intersection of new technology and the humanities has opened new avenues for researchers. This month, I’ll briefly present Omeka, an open-source web publishing platform tailored to cultural heritage. It makes exhibiting collections online and organising datasets a versatile and robust undertaking, empowering digital humanists in various aspects of their research aims.
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By Isabel Inzunza Gomez and Guillermo Ruz Troncoso
February 2024 – In a groundbreaking intersection between traditional scholarship and digital technology, Daniele Morrone presents TheSu XML, an innovative tool for the analysis of historical texts. He studied at Sapienza University of Rome and holds a PhD from the University of Bologna, defending a thesis entitled Plutarch’s Chemistry of Stones and Metals: Conceptions and Explanations. With an Appendix on TheSu XML Annotation Scheme, which led him to develop a unique tool in the field of digital humanities. The tool, initially conceptualized and tested for his Master’s thesis, was largely developed during his PhD and first postdoctoral appointments. Named TheSu XML (standing for Thesis-Support), it is designed to facilitate the study of philosophical and scientific texts through digital means. Morrone is currently a research fellow at KU Leuven, where he continues to bridge the historical divide between traditional scholarly research and pioneering digital analysis.
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By Celeste Pedro
January 2024 – I thought I’d start the year with a short list of nice resources for the digital humanities. From easy-to-use digital presentation tools to more complex software, we hope the following list is helpful or at least sparks our readers’ interest in new ways to get their work across to new audiences using digital environments.
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By Celeste Pedro
December 2023 – Maps have been among the most widespread visual tools since the early modern ages when a new understanding of space and the limits of the world started reshaping our minds. For those who would never have the chance to travel, maps made distances more tangible; for those travelling, ever more accurate maps made survival more likely; and eventually, those making or commissioning maps had the chance to become political agents. In this issue, I’ll present two examples of how the digital humanities have transformed how we access scholarly information and enjoy world heritage.
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By Celeste Pedro
November 2023 – This short review covers Transkribus, which is a software application that uses artificial intelligence to perform text recognition and transcription of handwritten and printed documents. With Transkribus, users can search and upload digitised corpus, use text recognition based on existing models or customised ones, and train, edit, export, and share their work.
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By Celeste Pedro
September 2023 – This short review covers two digital humanities resources available for the Spanish context. Despite their specificity regarding editorial type and geography, these tools prove how materials can be efficiently made publicly and digitally available to general audiences and how important it is to have scholars cataloguing, indexing, and describing public and private archives. In summa, the considerable effort needed to create such tools is of unquestionable value, and the impact they can have on researchers’ work is not marginal at all.
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By Celeste Pedro
Summer 2023 – The Corpus Chartarum Italicarum is an online database of papers produced in Italy since the 13th century, developed by the Central Institute for the Pathology of Archives and Books (Italy). The project was resumed over a decade ago and was recently made available to the public.
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By Celeste Pedro
May 2023 – Europeana is a European Union initiative resulting from the collaboration between three organisations devoted to creating, managing, and providing access to Europe’s digital cultural heritage. The Digital Storytelling Festival is held in partnership with The Heritage Lab and had its first edition back in 2021.
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By Celeste Pedro
April 2023 – This month, the Journal of the Portuguese Association of Librarians, Archivists and Documentation Professionals (BAD) announced a new automatic transcription project to be released in June 2023, coordinated by Hervé Baudry: TraPrInq. Automatic transcription has been the most powerful AI tool for researchers working with large collections. With increasing accuracy as more information is added to transcription models, it is still a time-consuming task to encode texts, and calligraphical documents are still the hardest to sample, as shape variation is at its highest, especially in historical records, where the legibility and readability of the texts was not a main concern.
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By Celeste Pedro
March 2023 – Terhi Marttila is a digital artist who programs works for the web browser. She works predominantly with voice and texts but also adds elements of play and playfulness to her works. Terhi’s work addresses topics such as migration, relationship to place, gendered beauty ideals and ageing. As I started a collaboration with her, I realized how insightful her ideas were about using digital means to express research questions. Here’s a sneak peek of a conversation we’d be delighted to continue with you!
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By Sarah Virgi
February 2023 – Professor Dag Nikolaus Hasse and his team at the Julius-Maximilians Universität Würzburg (Germany) are among the major contributors to the development of digital humanities in the field of medieval philosophy with two (complementary) long-term projects: the “Arabic and Latin Glossary” (ALGloss), since 2005, and “Arabic and Latin Corpus” (ALCorpus), since 2016. The ALGloss, funded by the Deutsche Vorschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and previously by the Volkswagen Foundation (Hannover), is a freely accessible online lexicon of the vocabulary of medieval authors writing in Arabic and their medieval Latin translators. It is based on 42 sources and covers terminology from a variety of different sciences, including philosophy, theology, astronomy, medicine, botany, among others. The ALCorpus, funded by the DFG’s Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, is a digital collection of Arabic-Latin translations of the 10th to 14th centuries. It comprehends a total of 104 digital texts, in Arabic and in Latin, up until this date. Fifty more texts, many of which related to the field of magic and the occult sciences, will soon be made available.
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By Celeste Pedro
January 2023 – Digital Humanities is a world of possibilities. The fact that it means something concrete (as using digital technologies to learn, teach and spread knowledge pertaining to the Humanities), nonetheless, also means that it could be anything. We are then left with the search for what matters about Digital Humanities, how is it different from “non-digital” Humanities, and why is it necessary for the Humanities? Different fields would answer with their particularities, but in general, the picture contains the following details: in academic research, automatic text analysis, AI, and large databases have become standard means of inquiry; in education, online classes and web resources have made it possible to overcome social distances. The availability of digital content and the proximity between people in online environments has already begun to change the Humanities in very positive ways. The digital is also a source of creativity. Having to adapt a very classical canon for doing things to a whole new system, a new language in some cases, is bringing the best out of theory and practice.
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Por Nicolás Lazaro
Diciembre 2022 – El curso brindado por las universidad de Maryland (UMD, EE.UU.) y del Salvador (USAL, Argentina) es parte de la iniciativa “Global Classrooms”, cuyo objetivo consistió en brindar todas las herramientas necesarias para “crear y evaluar sitios web desde una perspectiva crítica y centrada en las humanidades”. A partir de la filosofía del minimal computing, el curso privilegió “el uso de tecnologías abiertas, la propiedad de los datos y el código, la reducción de la infraestructura informática y, en consecuencia, el impacto ambiental”. El resultado esperado es que los participantes, al finalizar su formación, estén capacitados para realizar ediciones críticas o académicas de los textos fuentes, incorporar herramientas digitales a sus investigaciones, clases y publicaciones.
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By Nicolás Lazaro
November 2022 – This month, we interview Margherita Fantoli, who leads many projects in the Digital Humanities at KU Leuven. During the interview, she told us about her interests, occupation and current projects. Margherita gave us some insights about her work as a digital humanist and the tools she uses. The conversation also expanded on Margherita’s training from her beginnings as a philologist and mathematician to her professional development in the Digital Humanities. The short interview with Margherita will let you to know more about Margherita, her personal and academic story, the projects she is carrying and – of course – those which she would like to develop.
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By Celeste Pedro
October 2022 – Building a narrative around a scientific concept, or around a corpus, for example, will change how your work is perceived; and the way you communicate it will also change how the public reacts to your message. Having the skills to adapt research language to simplified, unambiguous and, at the same time, captivating storytelling can do a lot for academic research and the communities it wants to impact. We have all seen some of that during Covid-19, with huge amounts of data visualization research supporting public action. Digital Storytelling is, to put it very simply, telling a story using digital tools. It is a figure of style, one could say, that makes use of digital media (image, sound, and movement) to captivate and entangle the user. Depending on the tool one choses, it can also imply the possibility for the user to interact and take part of the story. This means that there is a higher chance that the message and/or meaning of the story gets through to its viewers.
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Por Nicolás Lazaro
Septiembre 2022 – En esta ocasión entrevistamos a Nicolás Vaughan, quien nos cuenta su ingreso “accidental” a las Humanidades Digitales, y el modo en que estas nuevas herramientas han logrado vencer algunos de sus prejuicios sobre su uso en el trabajo académico. Nos habla también sobre cómo las utiliza durante sus clases y cuáles son los objetivos que persigue como docente, al momento de presentarlas a sus estudiantes. Nos ofrece, además, dos reflexiones finales. La primera tiene que ver con las bondades del uso de herramientas open source en investigación (publicación incluida). En la segunda, hace un análisis de la situación de las HDs en la región.
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Por Nicolás Lazaro
Julio 2022 – En esta entrevista repasamos los inicios de Gimena del Río Riande en el campo de las Humanidades Digitales, algunas reflexiones en torno a la tarea e identidad del humanista digital y, finalmente, nos comparte su visión sobre los desafíos y las oportunidades que las HDs comportan para Latinoamérica.
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By Nicolás Lazaro
June 2022 – In this interview we explore Jeffrey’s approach to the DHs, and the limitations he found when working and presenting medieval manuscripts. His interests in creating a double apparatus led him to the XML-TEI (and related tools) and the possibility of separating the semantic-data he was creating from how it was presented. He also gives some insights on the SCTA project he is leading, as well as what benefits can a scholar get when working in the Digital Humanities.
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Por Nicolás Lazaro
Mayo 2022 – La génesis de esta idea tiene que ver, debo confesarlo, con una deficiencia propia, como he reconocido en otra ocasión: “las Humanidades Digitales han permanecido completamente veladas para mí en toda mi formación, de grado hasta posgrado. No hubo una sola vez en que un docente, cualquiera, desde su escritorio haya articulado la voz Humanidades Digitales” (Lázaro, 2021, p. 50). Pero claro, esto puede responder –entre otras muchas cosas– a lo que muy bien señalan dos referentes de este entrecruzamiento de disciplinas. En primer lugar, Gimena del Río Riande, cuando escribe que “el desarrollo y la aplicación de las Humanidades Digitales en los programas universitarios y de investigación de los países de habla hispana resulta buen ejemplo de la dificultad de transposición de la disciplina (o línea de trabajo, método, campo o etiqueta), tal y como se construyó dentro de los English Departments. Historia, cultura, condicionamientos socioeconómicos, moldean de un modo completamente diferente, a un lado y al otro del océano, a las Humanidades Digitales hispánicas”.
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