DIGITAL HISTORY

Digital History is a course offered in the Master's Degree Programme in 'Digital and Public Humanities'. It is backed by the Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities (VeDPH) within the Ca' Foscari Department of Humanities. It can be taken as Public and Digital History Mod. 2 (FM0489-2) and combined with FM0489-1, which focuses on Public History, to earn a total credit weight of 12 CFU. Alternatively, it can be taken as an individual course weighing 6 CFU (Digital History, FM0491). This course is designed in two complementary parts. The first introduces students to the theoretical skills, thinking tools, and technical expertise required for digital history. The second part of the course allows students to apply their academic knowledge to a project and gain practical experience. This course teaches students various techniques to analyse and document historical memories and develop foundational skills for advanced cultural heritage and technology investigations.

By the end of the course, students should be able to:
1. Identify and discuss the main techniques for decoding primary historical sources and encoding parsed information into machine-understandable systems.
2. Use information-gathering solutions and content management systems to visualise acquired information and simulate scenarios from a computational history perspective.
3. Generate interpretations and narratives around historical sources.
4. Develop a research practice and apply the acquired fundamental skills to a selected specimen.
5. Contribute to the learning environment by participating positively in-class discussions and presenting work clearly and cohesively.

No prerequisite to attend this course.

1. Computers in the Historian's Profession: Opportunities and Limitations
• Reflections on training machine learning algorithms for the next generation of historians;
• Towards a computational approach to history: The relationship between analog and digital sources;
• Reloading the treasure of human experiences into the digital time machine.

2. Augmentation vs. Replacement - Notes for a Conscious Use of Digital Technologies Applied to History
• Computational approaches as tools to overcome cultural barriers in the historian's profession;
• Digital Preservation & Open Source;
• Intersections between Digital & Public approaches;
• Decolonizing Digital Humanities: A constructive critique of Digital History;
• Data, Metadata, Big Data: Navigating the new "sea" of sources and methods.

3. Use of Tools and Features
• Understanding and navigating the main tools available to the digital historian;
• Practical applications of the tools examined in class;
• About history: Digital storytelling and digital communication.

4. Student Projects
• Research Data Management, sustainability, and data preservation;
• Designing a Digital History project and selecting appropriate tools;
• Student presentations.

N.B. Further information will be provided during classes

Books

Cohen, Daniel J., & Roy Rosenzweig (2006). Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. DOI: https://archive.org/details/digitalhistorygu0000cohe/page/n3/mode/2up

Salmi, Hannu (2020). What is Digital History?. New York: Wiley. https://www.wiley.com/en-us/What+is+Digital+History%3F-p-9781509537020

Blaney, Jonathan, Winters, Jane, Milligan, Sarah, & Steer Martin (2021). Doing digital history. A beginner's guide to working with text as data. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526132680/

Optional for Italian students: Paci, Deborah (2019), La storia in digitale. Milan: Unicopli - ISBN 9788840020914


Articles
Class discussions will be based on articles reading. Papers will be shared on Moodle from time to time.

The lecturer provides the text/materials discussed in the classroom, with any supporting tools, during the course and makes them available on the Moodle platform. These texts/materials, collected in a list at the end of the course, are an integral part of the examination program.

- Class project (individual or group)
- Continuous assessment (participation in class discussion of assigned readings, presentation of class project, peer review of class projects)
- Final exam (oral)

• Assigned readings that are to be completed before class.
• In-class discussion of assigned readings.
• In-class research activities that are instrumental to individual or group projects.
• Lectures based on case studies.
• Class participation in the discussion and interaction with the instructor and peers will enable students to develop assessment criteria for their own and their peers' projects.

English

oral