PUBLIC AND DIGITAL HISTORY MOD.2

The course belongs to the core educational activities of the Master’s Degree Programme in Digital and Public Humanities. The course Public and Digital History Mod. 2 (FM0489-2) is a course on Digital History. It can be combined with the first part of the homonymous course (FM0489-1), centred on Public History, with a total credit weight of 12 CFU, or chosen as a single course, with a weight of 6 CFU (Digital History, FM0491).
The aim of the course is to provide a broad understanding of arguments and debates about Digital History in Europe and outside Europe in order to compare theoretical approaches, tools and digital methods.

1) Knowledge and understanding

- to know the specific terminology of the discipline and understand the context in which it is used
- to know the arguments and debates about Digital History in Europe and outside Europe

2) Ability to apply knowledge and understanding

- to use in an appropriate manner the terminology related to the discipline
- to know how digital methods have been applied to an historical question in Europe and outside Europe

3) Judgment skills

- to know how the rise of digital technologies has changed the ways historians practice their craft

4) Communication skills

- to describe in an appropriate manner and critically the topics related to the discipline

5) Learning skills

- to critically use the bibliography and referral texts

This course is designed to provide historians with a first overview of the field of Digital History. No technical skills are required. Knowledge of the basic events of Modern and Contemporary History.

The course consists of two segments.

The first segment will look at the changing practice of doing history in the digital age and new ways for historians to share the results of their research with peers and with non-professionals.

The second part will explore the changing nature of historical sources in the digital age. We will examine how software tools are used by digital historians.

- Text mining
- Data visualization
- Network analysis
- Historical GIS

Primary Texts (for all students)

- Daniel J. Cohen, Roy Rosenzweig, Digital history: a guide to gathering, preserving, and presenting the past on the Web, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.

- Roy Rosenzweig, ‘Everyone a Historian’, in Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen (eds.), The Presence of the Past. Popular Uses of History in American Life, New York, Columbia University Press, 1998, pp. 177-189.

Student performance will be evaluated based on oral presentation related to the primary texts.

Front lectures and seminars.

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