Infrastructures for digital research: new opportunities and challenges

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Una collaborazione tra museo, enti di ricerca e scuola: l'epigrafia digitale e l'alternanza scuola lavoro

This paper presents a rich collaborative exchange between diverse institutions and professions engaged in research, conservation and education, brought together in the context of the Italian school-work exchange programme and with the aim of digitising, studying, and giving access to the epigraphic collection of the Museo Civico Castello Ursino of the city of Catania. The Museum is home to an important set of ancient inscribed texts on stone, with its origins in two local 18th-century antiquarian collections. A number of inscriptions were already on display following older criteria of museum exhibition; but most of the collection is held in storage. Therefore, one of the objectives of the collaboration is to make the rich epigraphic collection of the museum that is not on display accessible to the general public and academic researchers alike. The initial work of the three-year project concerned the digitisation of the catalogue records, as well as the graphic and photographic documentation of the inscriptions; during the second year, an exhibition was mounted in the Castello Ursino to present a selection of inscriptions from Catania. These inscriptions were the focus of an initial round of conservation work and were added to the digital catalogue together with supporting documentation. The inscriptions are encoded in accordance with international standards and controlled vocabularies (in EpiDoc TEI-XML, using Pleiades for geographical locations, and the controlled vocabularies of the EAGLE project for epigraphic types, materials and supports), with the aim of facilitating the creation of Linked Open Data. The exhibition includes two videos and a digital multimedia terminal to enable access to a wider range of materials as well as 3D imaging. The third year will be devoted to finalising both digitisation and documentation, and to more extensive result dissemination via the World Wide Web

Archaeology of Digital Environments: Tools, Methods, and Approaches

Digital archaeologists use digital tools for conducting archaeological work, but their potential also lies in applying archaeological thinking and methods to understanding digital built environments (i.e., software) as contemporary examples of human settlement, use, and abandonment. This thesis argues for digital spaces as archaeological artifacts, sites, and landscapes that can be investigated in both traditional and non-traditional ways. At the core of my research is the fundamental argument that human-occupied digital spaces can be studied archaeologically with existing and modified theory, tools, and methods to reveal that human occupation and use of synthetic worlds is similar to how people behave in the natural world. Working digitally adds new avenues of investigation into human behavior in relation to the things people make, modify, and inhabit. In order to investigate this argument, the thesis focuses on three video game case studies, each using different kinds of archaeology specifically chosen to help understand the software environments being researched: 1) epigraphy, stylometry, and text analysis for the code-artifact of Colossal Cave Adventure; 2) photogrammetry, 3D printing, GIS mapping, phenomenology, and landscape archaeology within the designed, digital heritage virtual reality game-site of Skyrim VR; 3) actual survey and excavation of 30 heritage sites for a community of displaced human players in the synthetic landscape of No Man’s Sky. My conclusions include a blended approach to conducting future archaeological fieldwork in digital built environments, one that modifies traditional approaches to archaeological sites and material in a post/transhuman landscape. As humanity continues trending towards constant digital engagement, archaeologists need to be prepared to study how digital places are settled, used, and abandoned. This thesis takes a step in that direction using the vernacular of games as a starting point

Empowering reuse of digital cultural heritage in context-aware crosscuts of European history

The paper presents the H2020 CrossCult project, providing a short overview, a summary of the platform developed by the project, a description of the consortium, lessons learnt in three main dimensions (humanities, technology and business), the open challenges and the main tools developed by the project

CrossCult: Empowering reuse of digital cultural heritage in context-aware crosscuts of European history

The paper presents the H2020 CrossCult project, providing a short overview, a summary of the platform developed by the project, a description of the consortium, lessons learnt in three main dimensions (humanities, technology and business), the open challenges and the main tools developed by the project

The Heritage Digital Twin: a bicycle made for two. The integration of digital methodologies into cultural heritage research

The paper concerns the definition of a novel ontology for cultural heritage based on the concept of digital twin. The ontology, called Heritage Digital Twin ontology, is a compatible extension of the well-known CIDOC CRM ISO standard for cultural heritage documentation and incorporates all the different documentation systems presently in use for cultural heritage documentation. In the authors' view, it supports documentation interoperability at a higher level than the ones currently in use and enables effective cooperation among different users.Comment: Submitted to Open Research Europe. 30 pages, 9 figure

AIUCD2019 - Book of Abstracts

L’ottava edizione del Convegno nazionale dell’Associazione per l’Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale, collocandosi nel solco delle precedenti edizioni, si pone l’obiettivo di costituire un punto di incontro tra studiosi delle diverse discipline che - a vario titolo - fanno capo alle cosiddette Digital Humanities: umanisti digitali, informatici, linguisti, storici, archeologi, musicologi, filologici e non solo. Il tema principale di questa ottava edizione è la “Didattica e ricerca al tempo delle Digital Humanities”. Si tratta di un ambito vasto che accomuna pratiche e settori di studio interdisciplinari e multidisciplinari e che riguarda i mutamenti della didattica e della ricerca nell'era digitale

AIUCD2019 - Book of Abstracts

L’ottava edizione del Convegno nazionale dell’Associazione per l’Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale, collocandosi nel solco delle precedenti edizioni, si pone l’obiettivo di costituire un punto di incontro tra studiosi delle diverse discipline che - a vario titolo - fanno capo alle cosiddette Digital Humanities: umanisti digitali, informatici, linguisti, storici, archeologi, musicologi, filologici e non solo. Il tema principale di questa ottava edizione è la “Didattica e ricerca al tempo delle Digital Humanities”. Si tratta di un ambito vasto che accomuna pratiche e settori di studio interdisciplinari e multidisciplinari e che riguarda i mutamenti della didattica e della ricerca nell'era digitale

Digital History and Hermeneutics

For doing history in the digital age, we need to investigate the “digital kitchen” as the place where the “raw” is transformed into the “cooked”. The novel field of digital hermeneutics provides a critical and reflexive frame for digital humanities research by acquiring digital literacy and skills. The Doctoral Training Unit "Digital History and Hermeneutics" is applying this new digital practice by reflecting on digital tools and methods

Vanishing Leaves: A Study of Walt Whitman Through Location-Based Mobile Technologies

Vanishing Leaves is a location-based mobile experience (LBME), which employs mobile devices equipped with GPS and high-speed wireless internet capabilities to take users to Brooklyn Heights to learn about the poet Walt Whitman and his connection to the neighborhood where he lived, worked, and published the first edition of his masterwork Leaves of Grass. Through this active first-person immersive learning experience, Vanishing Leaves embraces experimental scholarly methods that extend outside the classroom and off the page in order to engage learners and invite them to create meaningful, personal connections to writers and their literary works. The following white paper details the core concepts and inspiration underlying the development of Vanishing Leaves, including Whitman’s mobile composing practices and the importance influence of walking on his work, as well as ecocomposition theory and its exploration of the dynamic relationship between the writer, their discourse, and the environment. Following this groundwork, a detailed examination of the capabilities of mobile devices relevant to this project is offered. This analysis highlights important research, concepts, and existing projects that illuminate the potential for LBMEs to help us better understand cultural figures, their historical contexts, and the important connection between place and discourse surrounding cultural texts. Finally, an overview of the development of Vanishing Leaves will provide details regarding its methods and objectives, as well as some of the major challenges and lessons learned throughout the process. This white paper, instructions for playing Vanishing Leaves, and access to supplemental materials will be made available online at: http://vanishingleaves.com