TOOLS AND METHODOLOGIES SEMINARS (SL) - MOD. 3

The curriculum in Language Sciences is aimed at the acquisition of theoretical knowledge and the development of critical skills that allow doctoral students to understand linguistic phenomena in all their complexity, developing the ability to plan research aimed at the acquisition of new data and their analysis, as well as at proposing applicative interventions with social and cultural impact. The curriculum includes a wide range of linguistic research perspectives (formal, synchronic and diachronic, philological, sociolinguistic, computational, language teaching analysis, also applied to bilingual and bimodal contexts), also addressed with experimental methodologies that use sophisticated instruments (eye-tracker, fNIRS) and advanced statistical analysis models.
The training objective of this module is to contribute to the development and strengthening of methodological research skills and tools of the Germanic languages in synchronic and diachronic perspectives as well as philological methodologies of Germanic textual and cultural heritage processing, also digitally.

- in-depth understanding of the most recent models of formal analysis of Germanic languages in synchronic and diachronic perspectives
- in-depth understanding of the Langobard linguistic and textual heritage
- knowledge and ability to apply philological methodologies for textual processing, also digitally.
- knowledge of the research methods in the field of digital philology and of corpus linguistics applied to the Old Germanic languages
- ability to critically analyze, assess and synthesize new and complex ideas contributing to the refinement of theoretical models and application methodologies within the framework of Germanic Philology and Linguistics
- ability to communicate with peers, and with the wider community of Germanic philologists and linguists presenting one’s research in oral and written form in the semester tests of the relevant year.

Knowledge and skills assessed in the course of the selection process:
Excellent knowledge of the main principles of Germanic Philology and Linguistics
Knowledge of basic linguistics
Good knowledge of Digital Philology tools and visualization tools and XML editing softwares such as Edition Visualization Technology and Oxygen XML Editor.

Seminars organized in two main areas and an advanced workshop

1. Tools and methods of synchronic and diachronic linguistics (with a focus on Germanic languages)

Prof. Alessandra Giorgi (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia), 4 h:
With particular reference to Germanic languages, a range of topics in the field of comparative linguistics will be analyzed, and analytical tools for describing synchronic linguistic variation will be presented. In addition, other aspects of comparative syntax and morphosyntax will be considered.

Prof. Chiara De Bastiani (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia), 8 h:
The areas of linguistic change in Old and Middle Germanic languages still under scholarly debate will be examined. The Langobard linguistic tradition will also be examined within the framework of the Latin-Langobard linguistic contact.

2. Tools and methods for processing the Germanic linguistic and cultural heritage within the digital paradigm

Prof. Marina Buzzoni (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia), 4 h:
The principles underlying the functioning of neural networks will be critically illustrated. The main applications of these principles to technologies and tools used in the field of philology will then be examined, and issues relating to their applications in the field of generative AI will be addressed with philological case studies.

Prof. Chiara De Bastiani (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia), 4 h:
The corpora of ancient and medieval Germanic languages will be introduced, and the applied standards will be examined. The tools and methodologies for the valorisation of the Germanic linguistic and cultural heritage will also be discussed, introducing the ontologies of the cultural and bibliographical heritage domain and Linked Open Data.

Prof. Paola Peratello (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia), 4 h:
The seminar "Tools and Methods for Digital Scholarly Editions" will unfold in two parts: Part I will define the concept of digital scholarly edition along with the applied methodologies; Part II will showcase the main tools used for their preparation and visualization. Examples discussed will be drawn from the Germanic philological field.

Workshop on tools and methodology “Describing, Archiving, Visualising, Processing”
The workshop will introduce advanced theories, tools and methodologies for the computer-assisted elaboration textual and cultural heritage.

Selected bibliography

1. Tools and methods of synchronic and diachronic linguistics (with a focus on the Germanic languages):

Faulk, R. D. 2018. A comparative grammar of the Early Germanic languages. Studies in Germanic linguistics, John Benjamins publishing company. Open Access here: https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/books/9789027263131
Francovich Onesti, N. 1999. Vestigia longobarde in Italia. Lessico e Antroponimia. Artemide.
Giorgi Alessandra & Fabio Pianesi. 2001. Ways of terminating. In Carlo Cecchetto, Gennaro Chierchia & Maria Teresa Guasti (eds.), Semantic interfaces: reference, anaphora and aspect. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. 211-277
Coniglio, Marco, 2012. Modal particles, speaker-hearer links, and illocutionary force. In Werner Abraham and Elisabeth Leiss (eds.). Modality and Theory of Mind Elements across Languages, edited by Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2012, pp. 253-296.
Hinterhölzl, R. & Petrova, S. (eds.). 2009. Information Structure and Language Change: New Approaches to Word Order Variation in Germanic. Berlin: de Gruyter (letture selezionate).
Vicente, Luis. 2010. On the syntax of adversative coordination, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 28, 2, 381-415.


2. Tools and methods for processing the Germanic linguistic and cultural heritage within the digital paradigm:

Barteld, F., Ihden, S., Dreessen, K. & Schröder, I. 2018. “HiNTS: A Tagset for Middle Low German.” Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018), Miyazaki, Japan. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Ciotti, Fabio. 2023. “Minerva e il Pappagallo.”, https://testoesenso.it/index.php/testoesenso/article/view/671/587 Graziosi, Barbara, et al. 2023. "Machine Learning and the Future of Philology: A Case Study." TAPA, vol. 153 no. 1, p. 253-284. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/apa.2023.a901022 .
Roelli, Philipp et al. (eds). 2020. Handbook of stemmatology, https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/46670
Tang, KS., Cooper, G. 2024. “The Role of Materiality in an Era of Generative Artificial Intelligence.” Sci & Educ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-024-00508-0
Greenberg, 390:396–407. Communications in Computer and Information Science. Cham: Springer International Publishing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03437-9_38
Krause, T. & Zeldes, A. 2016: ANNIS3: A new architecture for generic corpus query and visualization. in: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 2016 (31). http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/content/31/1/118 5
Taylor, A., Marcus, M., & Santorini, B. 2003. “The Penn treebank: an overview.” Treebanks: Building and using parsed corpora, 5-22.
Zapounidou, S., Sfakakis, M. & Papatheodorou, C. 2013. “Highlights of Library Data Models in the Era of Linked Open Data.” In Metadata and Semantics Research, ed. By Emmanouel Garoufallou and Jane


Workshop on tools and methodology “Describing, Archiving, Visualising, Processing”:

Po, L., Bikakis, N., Desimoni, F., & Papastefanatos, G. 2020. Linked Data Visualization: Techniques, Tools, and Big Data. Synthesis Lectures on the Semantic Web: Theory and Technology.
Tomasi, F. 2022. Organizzare la conoscenza: Digital Humanities e Web semantico. Un percorso tra archivi, biblioteche e musei. Editrice Bibliografica.

The acquisition of knowledge and skills will be checked through oral assessments and term papers that PhD students must hand it at the end of the semester.

Interactive seminars in person

Italian

not present