A research project by Donato Ricci.
Project Scope
This research project brings together international programmers, designers, developers and researchers from across multiple disciplines to introduce innovative forms of studying and analyzing big data and social media. The various studies rely on new digital research methodologies in the humanistic and social sciences. The digital humanities is a growing research field defined as as the application of digital technologies to humanities and social sciences. It includes a variety of approaches, such as network theory for historical studies, digital analysis of archival manuscripts, the study geospatial data, and the use of social media to enhance teaching practices, among others.
Participating researchers employ different software technologies that help visualize digital and digitized data sets with the goal of preserving correlational and causal complexity. The project explores the link between different methodological concepts including content extraction, data analysis and visualization. Professor Ricci, one of the participants, is the founder of a text-analysis software called SVEN, an experimental tool to collect, organize and analyze text fragments from online and offline documents. By increasing the information accessibility via visualization methods and automatic term extractions, tools like SVEN allow researchers to follow emerging issues through time and provides them with a better understanding on the information collected.
The project’s objective consists of shaping and defining the emerging field of digital humanities, which, in turn, examines how traditional scholarship and teaching are transformed and redefined by new digital methodologies in a data-driven world.
Useful links to explore the field of digital methods and digital humanities :
- Digital Methods Initiative, European collaboration network
- Digital Methods, published by MIT Press
- Digital Humanities at Oxford University
- Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College
- Stanford Humanities Center, Digital Humanities Initiative
- Digital Humanities New York City, research network