13 - 7 - 2016 Krakow

Digicraft and 'Systemic' Thinking in Digital HumanitiesEnrica Salvatori - LabCD - Università di Pisa (DH2016)

Manfred Thaller 2014 - BolognaAre the Humanities an endangered or dominant species in the digital ecosystem? Yes if1. conceive of themselves as researchers

and not as conversationalists2. strive for a vision

3. change the epistemology of the Humanities

4. drive technology and not be driven by it

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 we do

Do we really need to tell what’s DH are?

✤ 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

What: a partly driven and partly spontaneous reading of the epigraphic messages left over time in a cityCompetences: history, public history, epigraphy, paleography, writing, dramatize, processing images, audio and video, web designWho: scholars, DH graduated, MA DH students, BA DH studentsFocus: Digital Public History

✤ 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

✤ 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

✤ 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

TSS

✤ Focus: Digital Epigraphy

✤ Competences: history, education, e-learning, epigraphy, paleography, writing, digital images and video, collaborative tools

✤ Who: Phd, DH graduated, MA DH students

✤ in DH2016, A15 Scholarly editions 5, Thursday 14:30 - MADB

✤ 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

What have they in common?

✤ they are digital

✤ they embrace necessarily more subjects and disciplines

✤ they are open

✤ they were built in a sort of “new Renaissance workshop” i.e. a digital craft (DIGICRAFT).

4.

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

Interdisciplinarity is compulsory

✤ 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

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"

The Renaissance Workshop

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

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)

✤ it often happens that some student acquire, 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

TraMonti DIGICRAFT

Manager

Web Site

History

Video interviews Archaeology

Server

Administration

Digital Public Historian

DH MA graduated

Web GISScholars

PhD

Scholars Humanities Students

Univ. staff

town Hall staffPdH

MA graduated MA students

MA studentsHS students

Codice Pelavicino DIGICRAFT

Manager

Web SiteHistory

server

Text coding

Digital Public Historian Scholar

DH MA graduated

EVT Software Collaborative tools

MA students

Scholars Local historians

Univ. staff

ScholarMA DH students BA DH students

EditionPaleographers

Historians

A DIGICRAFT is anywhere on a DH project teachers 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

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.

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

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

✤ today 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

A Unifying Vision

✤ 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

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

enrica.salvatori@unipi.it