Informatica E Scienze Umane

This book gathers, and makes available in English, with new introductions, previously out of print or otherwise difficult to access articles by Fr Roberto Busa S.J. (1913 - 2011). Also included is a comprehensive bibliography of Busa, an oral history interview with Busa's translator, and a substantial new chapter that evaluates Busa's contributions and intellectual legacies. The result is a groundbreaking book that is of interest to digital humanists and computational linguists as well as historians of science, technology and the humanities. As the application of computing to cultural heritage becomes ever more ubiquitous, new possibilities for transmitting, shaping, understanding, questioning and even imagining the human record are opening up. Busa is considered by many to be among the pioneers in this field, and his research on projects like the Index Thomisticus is one of the earliest known examples of a humanities project that incorporated automation; it continues to be widely cited and used today. Busa published more than 350 academic articles and shorter pieces in numerous languages, but despite the unquestionable importance of his early work for understanding the history and development of fields like humanities computing and computational linguistics, a large part of his canon and thinking remained inaccessible or difficult to access until this book.

Since the very beginnings of the digital humanities, Papyrology has been in the vanguard of the application of information technologies to its own scientific purposes, for both theoretical and practical reasons (the strong awareness towards the problems of human memory and the material ways of preserving it; the need to work with a multifarious and overwhelming amount of different data). After more than thirty years of development, we have now at our disposal the most advanced tools to make papyrological studies more and more effective, and even to create a new conception of "papyrology" and a new model of "edition" of the ancient documents. At this turining point, it is important to build an epistemological framework including all the different expressions of Digital Papyrology, to trace a historical sketch setting the background of the contemporary tools, and to provide a clear overview of the current theoretical and technological trends, so that all the possibilities currently available can be exploited following uniform pathways. The volume represents an innovative attempt to deal with such topics, usually relegated into very quick and general treatments within journal articles or papyrological handbooks.

Nel volume 31.2 sono pubblicati gli Atti di due Convegni internazionali. Il primo, “Milano internazionale: la fragilità territoriale dei contesti archeologici” (Milano, 13 marzo 2019), promosso dal Dipartimento di Beni Culturali e Ambientali dell’Università degli Studi di Milano e dal Dipartimento di Architettura e Studi Urbani del Politecnico di Milano, è a cura di G. Bagnasco Gianni, S. Bortolotto, A. Garzulino e M. Marzullo. Il secondo, “Logic and computing. The underlying basis of digital archaeology”, è una sessione speciale dell’IMEKO TC-4 International Conference on Metrology for Archaeology and Cultural Heritage (MetroArchaeo, Firenze, 4-6 dicembre 2019), a cura di A. Caravale e P. Moscati. Gli Atti raccolgono rispettivamente 9 e 15 contributi, introdotti dai curatori che illustrano scopi e risultati delle ricerche presentate, in cui l’uso delle tecnologie informatiche è determinante per l’analisi, l’interpretazione e la diffusione e valorizzazione dei dati. La prospettiva diacronica della sessione dedicata al calcolo e alla logica nella storia dell’informatica archeologica consente di collegare, attraverso un ponte teorico-metodologico, le prime esperienze di informatizzazione dei dati archeologici con le tendenze più recenti dell’archeologia digitale.

The Letter before the Spirit underlines the importance for scholars to have at their disposal reliable scientific text editions – book editions or digital editions – of Aristotle’s works in the Semitico-Latin, and the Graeco-Latin, translation and commentary traditions.

This book describes and explains the fundamental changes that are now taking place in the most traditional areas of humanities theory and method, scholarship and education. The changes flow from the re-examination of the very foundations of the humanities - its theories of textuality and communication - that are being forced by developments in information technology. A threshold was crossed during the last decade of the twentieth century with the emergence of the World Wide Web, which has (1) globalized access to computerized resources and information, and (2) made interface and computer graphics paramount concerns for work in digital culture. While these changes are well known, their consequences are not well understood, despite so much discussion by digital enthusiasts and digital doomsters alike. In reconsidering these matters, Radiant Textuality introduces some remarkable new proposals for integrating computerized tools into the central interpretative and critical activities of traditional humanities disciplines, and of literary studies in particular.