Humanities and Computer Science, a new perspective

Humanities and Computer Science: fields of research and application whose encounter is more recent that what one may believe based on today's digital habits are at the core of growing professional interests and stimuli for new training paths.

Paolo Mastandrea, tenured professor of Latin at Ca’ Foscari University, coordinated the symposium Latin Texts and Digital Tools. Research Perspectives, carried out on May 23rd in the Department of Humanities at Palazzo Malcanton Marcorà, and which dealt with creating archives of electronic text files where search engines are applied enabling comparison between texts, with the aim of carrying out ‘intertextual’, linguistic, philological and stylistic surveys that would not be permitted on paper-based printing materials.

Digital technologies and resources: tools or substitutes?

“The ability to access wide repositories of texts made open to scholars from all nations, from different training places, experiences and disciplines, was the first step towards the development of digital applications for publishing, exegesis and philology of the texts. However, the greatest opportunity does not consist solely of the tool itself, as in the relationships that it can show in comparing multiple texts, and supporting the encounter between scholars and specialists from different yet communicating disciplines, and potentially complimentary in solving current issues.
Therefore it is not only about digitalizing texts, nor databases aimed at consultation, because only the critical digital edition can represent accurately the great complexity of a text. Take the case of theater. Are you familiar with the 17th century opera libretti? In the days of Metastasio or Goldoni, the staging may have differed from representation to representation, as depicted in printed libretti. Nobody could describe variations when there are dozens of witnesses. The more recent project, developed together with our colleagues at the SUNY, is called "Tesserae Musivae. A Common Infrastructure for Digital Approaches to Classical Intertextuality", financed by the Mellon Foundation as an innovative "Transatlantic Project" (2016) through the mediation of the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris".

What are the changes in the days of electronic philology?

“If, the philologist’s task used to consist primarily in data collecting, now the responsibility is more complex. It is primarily an upstream work, conceiving research paths and then the research approach, determining the data submitted to the 'machine' and its analysis by the scholar. Somehow today's philologist has broader opportunities but also greater burdens, often provoking perplexity in some of those researchers who are attached to research patterns established and consolidated for centuries".

Can one talk about humanistic computer science today?

“I don’t think it is easy to find scholars who combine engineering and technological skills with the cultural competences of the multidisciplinary humanist: to develop ambitious and wide-ranging research projects with high certified value, we need to work closely together for long periods of time: joint experience is still essential, but it is from these combinations and collaborations (as well as the new study programmes) that creative figures, sensitive to the research needs of others and able to ‘invent’ refined and adaptable tools for single disciplines, will emerge".

Interview conducted by Hélène I. Duci.