Presentation

Web resources for Digital Humanities are plentiful, but it is necessary to evaluate their quality, to cite and quote them correctly, to extend and maintain them. The first action of this course is devoted to improve your skills in the use and creation of reliable web resources for academic purposes, such as writing a paper or a thesis, in the domain of human and social sciences.
The second action of the course is devoted to the use of web tools to create new digital editions, to share bibliographical references in standard formats, to detect plagiarism in suspected papers and, finally, to retrieve multilingual documents related to your domain of interest.
Research infrastructures not only distribute resources and tools, but also ensure the interoperability among them by the compliance to standard formats and procedures.The third action of the course is devoted to illustrate the role that the research infrastructures may assume in your domain specific activity.

Teaching method

The course is based on lectures with slideshows and lab activities, in which the students apply their new skills to case studies discussed with the teacher and the classmates.

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course, students will be able:
1. to evaluate the reliability of information sources available on the web;
2. to create and share a collection of bibliographical references;
3. to create a simple digital edition based on resources available online;
4. to exploit multilingual documents retrieved from the web for their research purposes.

Syllabus

1.1. Overview
1.2. Lab: Searching for information at different levels of reliability
2.1. Reliability and Validity
2.2. Lab: Following the development of an idea: the intuition (a simple post in a blog); the exposition (an abstract submitted to a conference); the demonstration (a peer reviewed paper published by a scientific journal); the dissemination (a TED-like talk)
3.1. The (myth of the) Neutral Point of View
3.2. Lab: How Wikipedia approaches the Neutral Point of View on sensitive topics
4.1. Digital libraries, archives and repositories
4.2. Lab: Diving the documents of Archive.org
5.1. Primary sources and their digital representation
5.2. Lab: Proof-reading on WikiSource
6.1. From digitized texts to digital editions
6.2. Lab: Marking texts according the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines
7.1. Citing and quoting digital resources
7.2. Lab: Mastering Zotero to share bibliographical references
8.1. Managing multiple versions of the same document
8.2. Lab: How Control Version Systems work
9.1. Plagiarism detection tools
9.2. Lab: How to compare documents, in order to detect plagiarism
10.1. Multilingual resources and tools
10.2. Lab: Exploring parallel corpora and multilingual lexico-semantic resources
11.1. Cross-language information retrieval
11.2. Lab: Cross-language information retrieval in action
12.1. Research infrastructures
12.2. Lab: Exploring the language resources and technologies provided by CLARIN and the data and tools for Digital Humanities provided by DARIAH

During the exam week, students will discuss their final presentation.

Evaluation criteria

60% oral presentation and participation
40% final presentation

Bibliography

American Psychological Association. 2016. Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. 6th ed. Washington, D.C.: APA.

Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, eds. 2016. A New Companion to Digital Humanities. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell.

Douglas W. Oard. 2006. “Transcending the Tower of Babel: Supporting Access to Multilingual Information with Cross-Language Information Retrieval.” In Emergent Information Technologies and Enabling Policies for Counter-Terrorism, edited by Robert L. Popp and John Yen, 299-314. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons.

Further references will be provided along the course.