85448 - DIGITAL TEXT IN THE HUMANITIES: THEORIES, METHODOLOGIES AND APPLICATIONS (1) (LM)

Anno Accademico 2021/2022

  • Docente: Tiziana Mancinelli
  • Crediti formativi: 6
  • SSD: L-FIL-LET/14
  • Lingua di insegnamento: Inglese
  • Modalità didattica: Convenzionale - Lezioni in presenza
  • Campus: Bologna
  • Corso: Laurea Magistrale in Digital humanities and digital knowledge (cod. 9224)

Conoscenze e abilità da conseguire

The course aims at providing a theoretical and practical knowledge in the application of digital methods and tools for the representation encoding and analysis of texts (literary and not). At the end of the course the students will acquire advanced skills in the techniques and issues related to the creation and the dissemination of electronic documents and the creation and management of digital text archives.

Contenuti

In this course, theoretical lectures will always be followed by practical sessions. Students are encouraged to bring a laptop to class. The programme aims to be flexible and responsive to the interests and needs of the participants.

 

Week 1: Introduction to the course and digital scholarly edition in practice

The first week will be devoted to:

  • An introduction to the course and course logistics, assessment and projects

  • Modeling specific aspects of TEI/XML documents, including references with LOD (Linked Open Data), with reference to case studies

  • An introduction to IIIF linked to TEI/XML files

Laboratory: Examine and compare some practical examples of different approaches to digital texts. Explore different models of textual scholarship with TEI/XML, including other technologies such as LOD and IIIF.

Week 2: Visualise a digital scholarly edition with XSLT and XQUERY

  • Introduction to visualising XML data through XML-related languages

  • Introduction to transforming your XML documents with XSLT (extensible stylesheet language transformation) and XPATH (a language for navigating in XML documents)

  • Overview of a variety elements, variables, and functions of XSLT and XPATH languages

Laboratory: Practise how to transform your XML/TEI texts to HTML and other formats such as PDF, TXT, other output formats.

Week 3: XML-related languages: XQuery

  • Introduction to querying your XML documents with Xquery (extensible stylesheet language transformation)

  • How to query and transform your encoded texts with XQuery.

  • How to publish documents and data to the Web and a case study on Exist-DB

Laboratory: Practise how to transform and query your XML/TEI texts.

Week 4: Introduction to distant reading and methods of computer-assisted practices for interpreting texts

  • Introduction to distant reading (a term coined by Franco Moretti)

  • Text analysis with shell scripts

  • Overview to tools such as Voyant, etc.

Laboratory: How to retrieve and visualise data, and construe meaning using traditional methods and techniques of interpretation.

Week 5: Spatial analysis and Topic Modeling

  • Spatial analysis and geodata using Recogito: https://recogito.pelagios.org/

  • Topic modeling with tools such as Mimno: https://mimno.infosci.cornell.edu/jsLDA/

Laboratory: Tools will be used on previously chosen and selected corpora of texts

Week 6: Network analysis and representation

  • Network analysis

  • Graph representation with Gephi

Laboratory: tools will be used on previously chosen and selected corpora of texts

Metodi didattici

Lectures, seminars, and practical exercises will be organised to give a full overview of the theoretical framework of each topic, together with its practical methods.

Modalità di verifica e valutazione dell'apprendimento

Laboratories will follow each lecture. Students will present their contribution to their final grade.

The presentation of the students' proposed project will be a key focus of the final examination. It may focus on one of the topics covered in class: publication of digital scholarly editions, or other distant reading techniques and methods. The project should have both a theoretical and practical combination.

Project guidelines will be shared and discussed at the beginning of the course. Students may divide into small groups (maximum 3), or propose a project individually.

The personal contribution of each member of a group will be evaluated during an oral interview, and shown in the GitHub publication.

Both the project and the course content will be evaluated in the oral interview.

The project and the oral examination each contribute 50% of the final grade.

Strumenti a supporto della didattica

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

Orario di ricevimento

Consulta il sito web di Tiziana Mancinelli