Keynote speech at AHLIST congres in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria (2016)

1. 17-11-2016 Las Palmas - Gran Canaria
Digicraft and 'Systemic'Thinking
in Digital Humanities
Reasoning on the Perspectives of the Discipline
Enrica Salvatori - LabCD - Università di Pisa

2. 17-11-2016 Las Palmas - Gran Canaria
Traversing Peripheries and Centers:
Confluence, Empowerment and Innovation
What Digital Humanities are?
Engaging Peripheries or a new Center?

3. ManfredThaller
2014 - Bologna
Are the Humanities an endangered or
dominant species in the digital ecosystem?
Yes if
1. conceive of themselves as researchers
and not as conversationalists
2. strive for a vision
3. change the epistemology of the
Humanities
4. drive technology and not be driven by it

4. Serge Noiret 2015
International
Federation of Public
History (IFPH)
Definition of Digital History, Public History,
Digital Public History
✤ Digital History and Digital Public
History are areas of research and not
merely new forms of communication of
old disciplines (Thaller’s point 1)
✤ He answered to Thaller’s items 2 and 3
by proposing a more accurate taxonomy
of DH.
✤ The answer is a more strict definition of
what we are and what we do

5. Do we really need to tell
what’s DH are?
✤ yes but..
✤ Each taxonomy of knowledge unavoidably builds
walls and fences that encase the knowledge itself in a
series of sterile boxes
✤ It’s better to focus our attention on what could be our
own vision and on defining DH in terms of the
emerging changes of method in our daily research
and work

6. What: a partly driven and partly spontaneous reading of the
epigraphic messages left over time in a city (not edition by now)
Competences: history, public history, epigraphy, paleography,
writing, dramatize, processing images, audio and video, web design
Who: scholars, DH graduated, MA DH students, BA DH students
Focus: Digital Public History

7. ✤ What: a complex project aimed to enhance the cultural
heritage of an Italian rural valley through the active
participation of residents. Invented archives of video
interviews and pictures; webGIS of cultural heritage,
traditional study

8. ✤ Focus: Digital Public History
✤ Competences: history & archaeology, public history & archaeology,
digital libraries, education, writing, dramatize, GIS, digital images
and videos, collaborative tools, web design, management
✤ Who: scholars, PhD, DH graduated, BA DH students, MA DH
students, HS students

9. ✤ What: a research & education project about
collaborative learning in Canadian and Senegal classic
humanities classes to transcribe and to read Roman
lead tags, using a Digital Autoptic Process (DAP) in a
Web environment

10. TSS
✤ Focus: Digital Epigraphy
✤ Competences: history, education, e-learning,
epigraphy, paleography, writing, digital images and
video, collaborative tools, text encoding
✤ Who: Phd, DH graduated, MA DH students
✤ in DH2016, A15 Scholarly editions 5, Thursday 14:30 -
MADB

11. ✤ What: critical digital
edition of a medieval
manuscript (XIII
century) that invites
readers to actively
participate
✤ Focus: Digital Philology
✤ Competences: history & public history, text encoding, philology,
paleography, codicology, writing, digital images, collaborative tools,
web design, management
✤ Who: scholars, DH graduated, MA DH students, BA DH students

12. 17-11-2016 Las Palmas - Gran Canaria
DigiPal
http://www.digipal.eu/

13. DigiPal
DigiPal is a new resource for the study of medieval handwriting (England 1000–1100).
It is designed to allow you to see samples of handwriting from the period and to
compare them with each other quickly and easily.
It currently contains:
✤ 1675 records of manuscripts and charters
✤ 963 manuscript images
✤ 62735 images of letters (graphs)
✤ 1475 records of scribal hands.
Funded by the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), it is based at
the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London

14. DigiPal Staff

15. 17-11-2016 Las Palmas - Gran Canaria
Epigraphia 3D

16. ✤ collaborations with museums
Museo Arqueológico Nacional
(Madrid) - Museo Nacional de
Arte Romano (Mérida) —>
MANAGEMENT
✤ knowledge through
resources developed for the
website and others links —>
PALEOGRAPHY,
PROFESSIONAL WRITING,
WEB DESIGNER
✤ Access from mobile devices
—> APP DEVELOPER,
COMPUTER SCIENCE

17. Epigraphia 3D staff
and others..

18. What have they in common?
1. they are digital
2. they embrace necessarily more subjects and
disciplines
3. they are open
4. they were built in a sort of “new Renaissance
workshop” i.e. a digital craft (DIGICRAFT)

19. 1.They are digital
This may seem trivial but it is not
✤ these are projects “born digital”
✤ they could not exist outside the incredible interaction between real
and digital world that it is now our life

20. 2.They HAVE to be interdisciplinary
✤ DH is an unavoidably and profoundly interdisciplinary field
✤ each project is a complex set of activities and skills that crosses, by its
true nature, several fields, each one with is “new” methodology
✤ this change of practice and approach implies a sort of
methodological revolution, because it requires an organization of
work similar to a Renaissance workshop (a DIGICRAFT) with an
articulated division of labor in relation to several levels of skills
✤ education and training could be provided by the same learners
coordinated by a strong and mature central idea

21. 3. Openess
✤ A multidisciplinary team has to use
different tools and sustainability requires
using open source tools
✤ A DH project means sharing data not only
among researches but also thinking how to
share the content with the general public
✤ Openness is then a natural result, even it is
also an ethical, political and philosophical
choice as the Digital Manifesto 2.0 says:
✤ “the digital is the realm of the open, open
source, open resources"

22. 4.The RenaissanceWorkshop
In a Renaissance workshop different
objects were produced: statues, paintings,
goldsmith etc. Each handwork was a
“project” that asked:
✤ a strong artistic and cultural vision
(message, style, function, purpose, style)
✤ a complex set of different techniques
mastered by different workers with different skills
✤ the owner (or the head-artist) had not to be an expert in each technique, but his
employees could in many ways be more skilled then him, all members of the
workshop could learn from each others.
✤ The owner had to keep the team together with a clear idea of the work itself

23. DIGICRAFT, a new renaissance lab
✤ each project is taken over as an interdisciplinary complex
object that requires specific skills, different but related
competences
✤ students of the Bachelor and Master's degree in DH work
as interns or undergraduates
✤ whe work is mastered by one “manager” (a Digital
Humanist) but followed by experts (graduated, PhDs),
who assign specific tasks ensuring an active connection
among everyone in the team (collaborative tools)

24. DIGICRAFT, a new renaissance lab
✤ it often happens that a student acquires, in a particular
technique, a greater skill: he/she becomes able to propose
substantial changes in the work chain and also to teach
✤ The manager is not required to know everything in
depth. He/she must be able:
*) to see always clearly the aim and the nature of the work
*) to communicate effectively with everyone in the team
*) to know a little bit of everything

25. TraMonti DIGICRAFT
Manager
Web Site
History
Video interviews Archaeology
Server
Administration
Digital Public Historian
DH MA graduated
Web GIS
Scholars
PhD
Scholars
Humanities Students
Univ. staff
town Hall staff
PdH
MA graduated
MA students
MA students
HS students

26. Codice Pelavicino DIGICRAFT
Manager
Web Site
History
server
Text coding
Digital Public Historian
Scholar
DH MA graduated
EVT Software
Collaborative tools
Digital Philology Scholar
DH MA students
Scholars
Local historians
Univ. staff
Scholar
MA DH students
BA DH students
Edition
Paleographers
Historians

27. A DIGICRAFT is anywhere on a DH project teachers and
researchers and technicians and students exchange
knowledge and leverage this interaction to offer innovative
and effective solutions, combining the theoretical reasoning
with practices and skills
This is possible only if the manager and the team share a
common strong vision of what a DH project is,
embracing a "systemic" or “organic” or “holistic” thinking
of DH itself

28. DH build machines
that help man to
think
(F.Varanini)
If Humanities helps mankind to understand the human world, DH
helps mankind to partecipate, to share, to understand, to use knowledge
in a more democratic and systemic way, in a word TO THINK
The core of DH is unitary and lies in the conviction that the digital turn
has permeated every aspect of our lives as people and scholars,
modifying them deeply. We have to deal with them as a whole.

29. Science & Humanities
✤ since XVIII century hard sciences grounded their epistemology on
reductionism
✤ reductionism believes that studying in depth a feature of a phenomenon
it is the only way to understand it completely by progressive addition
of discoveries
✤ the reductionist approach has been the basis for the scientific
revolution of the modern age, but it also led to an exasperated
fragmentation of the fields of scientific research and to the disjunction
between Science and Humanities
✤ humanities were affected as well and created absurd barriers and hyper-
specialized languages, that closed researches in a lot of walled gardens

30. HC DH
✤ 70s of XXth century: a vision of Humanities Computing that kept almost
unchanged the traditional disciplines within their rigid internal divisions and
distinguished the humanist from the expert in information technology
✤ NOW this position is no longer sustainable. The web in first place and the
web 2.0 in the second (but also the Big Data field as well as the Data
Visualization tools) have changed the research landscape and demolish the
barrier between tools, methods and ways of sharing
✤ we are obviously still in a transitional phase. Highly specialized sub-areas
remain and several scholars strive to better define the old / new digital
disciplines (digital history, digital philology and so on), but there is also a
complementary phenomenon pointing to an inclusive and unitary vision of
DH

31. A UnifyingVision
✤ For thirty years a different vision has made
its way, a new epistemological approach
in several field of research
✤ the systemic thinking (Unifying Vision)
reasons in terms of relationships, networks,
patterns of organizations and processes
✤ it proposes a change of paradigms: from
the vision of the world as a machine to the
world as a network
✤ it takes account of the fundamental
interdependence of all phenomena

32. A change of paradigm
This change of paradigm could and should affect the DH
as well because:
✤ this is in the nature of our work
✤ this is where our practice leads
✤ this is a unique opportunity for DH to find a unitary
vision and to ground its social utility again

33. enrica.salvatori@unipi.it