Francesca Tomasi is associate professor in Archival Science, Bibliography and Librarianship at the University of Bologna (Italy). Her research is mostly devoted to digital humanities, with a special attention to documentary digital editions and knowledge organization methods in the Semantic web environment.
She holds a degree in Conservation of cultural heritage - archives and libraries (1997), a postgraduate in Palaeography, Diplomatic and Archival Science (1998), a specialization in Computer Science - Web technologies (1999), and a PhD in Italian Studies - digital scholarly editions (2003).
She is the Director of the PhD in ‘Cultural Heritage in the Digital Ecosystem’, a programme involving 12 different Departments and 22 scholars from different research domains, that she founded in 2022, and she is the Head of the ‘Digital Humanities Advanced Research Center’ (/DH.arc), a network of researchers for designing and developing projects in the field of digital philology, computational linguistics, semantic publishing, and knowledge management in the cultural heritage, that she founded in 2018.
She has been President of the Library of the School of Humanities in the University of Bologna (BDU – ‘Biblioteca di Discipline Umanistiche’) for the years 2014-2019, Director of the international second cycle degree in ‘Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge’ (DHDK), that she founded in 2017 and coordinated until 2022, and President of the Italian Association of Digital Humanities (AIUCD – Associazione per l’Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale) for the years 2018-2020.
She is a member of the editorial board of a few journals, such as «Bibliothecae.it» and «J-LIS», «Documenta», «Schede umanistiche» and she is among the founders of the academic journal «Umanistica Digitale».
She attended, as invited or accepted (peer review), more or less 200 national and international research conferences (such as TEI, ADHO conference, TPDL, IRCDL, DocEng, MTSR, EADH, AI*IA). In particular, as invited speaker she had a number of talks: e.g. opening plenary lecture on “Semantic Web as an interlinking environment for knowledge dissemination in the cultural heritage domain”, at "DHN 2016 Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries" (Oslo, Norvey, 2016); Closing keynote on “Linked Open Data perspectives in Semantic Digital Editing”, at “TEI conference 2019: What is text, really? TEI and beyond" (Graz, Austria, 2019).
Currently, she is the principal investigator of some research projects, in which she is the supervisor of 5 PhD students, 1 research assistants, and 2 scholarship-awarded fellows.
She organized a number of international workshops and conferences (being also editor of the related proceedings), among them: “AIUCD2014 - Humanities and Their Methods in the Digital Ecosystem” (Bologna, 2014); “Scholarly Digital Editing, Graph Data-Models and Semantic Web Technologies” (Lausanne, 2019).
Finally, she is editor and scientific director of several digital scholarly projects at /DH.arc (e.g. Vespasiano da Bisticci, Lettere; Paolo Bufalini, Quaderno; MythLOD; Zeri&LODe, Aldo Moro digital scholarly edition, FICLIT Digital Library).
Among her last publications, the volume: Organizzare la conoscenza: Digital Humanities e Web Semantico, Editrice Bibliografica, 2022. A complete list of books, papers, chapters of volumes, datasets and digital projects at https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/francesca.tomasi/publications.
