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 Craft. Opportunities and Limits.
• Reflections on Training Machine Learning Algorithms for the Next Generation of Historians.
• Towards a Computational Approach to History. The Principle of Computational Equivalence and the Phenomenon of Computational Irreducibility in Historical Sciences.
• Reloading the Treasure of Human Experiences into the Digital Time Machine

2. National Historiographies at the Computational Turn.
• Gazing at the World as Seen by the Others.
• Linguistic Obstacles: A New Tower of Babel?
• Computational Approaches as Tools to Overcome Cultural Barriers in the Historian’s Craft.

3. History, Films, and Online Video Streaming.
• Communicating History with Films.
• The Animated Picture is a Privileged Medium to Screen Historical Narratives in Films.
• Validating Historical Narratives in Films.

4. Students’ Projects:
• The Online System Engineering Historical Memory (EHM): Methods and Tools.
• Students are guided in the development of an online application on EHM.
• Students’ Presentations.

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

Graham, Shawn, Ian Milligan, & Scott Weingart (Eds.) (2016). Exploring Big Historical Data. The Historian’s Macroscope. London: Imperial College Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1142/p981

Tomasin, Lorenzo (2017). L’impronta digitale. Cultura umanistica e tecnologia. Rome: Carocci editore.

Nanetti, A. (2023) Computational Engineering of Historical Memories: With a Showcase on Afro-Eurasia (ca 1100-1500 CE). London UK and New York USA: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003310860

Articles

Bentley, Peter (2022). “Augmented Intelligence: What it is and why it will be smarter than AI.” BBC Science Focus Magazine (blog). February 1, 2022. DOI: https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/augmented-intelligence

Bolo, Jacques (2016). “Umberto Eco and Artificial Intelligence.” Exergue, March. DOI: https://www.exergue.com/h/2016-03/tt/eco-perfect-lang.html
Gavin, Michael (2014). “Agent-based modeling and historical simulation.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, 8(4). DOI: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/8/4/000195/000195.html

Luo, S. S., Shedd, B. A., & Nanetti, A. (2018). Enhancing the Experience of the Western Xia Imperial Tombs Heritage Site (PRC, Ningxia) through Animated Installations. SCIRES-IT (SCIentific RESearch and Information Technology), 8(1), 1-32. http://www.sciresit.it/article/view/12905

Nanetti, A., & Benvenuti, D. (2019). Animation of two-dimensional pictorial works into multipurpose three-dimensional objects. The Atlas of the Ships of the Known World depicted in the 1460 Fra Mauro’s mappa mundi as a showcase. SCIRES-IT (SCIentific RESearch and Information Technology), 9(2), 29-46. http://www.sciresit.it/article/view/13151

Nanetti, A. (2021). Defining Heritage Science. A Consilience Pathway to Treasuring the Complexity of Inheritable Human Experience through Historical Method, AI and ML, in «Complexity», vol. 2021, special issue on Tales of Two Societies: On the Complexity of the Coevolution between the Physical Space and the Cyber Space [selected as Annual Issue of the journal], edited by CHEN S.-H. (Lead Editor), S. Alfarano and D. Shen (Guest Editors), Article ID 4703820, 13 pages. https://www.hindawi.com/journals/complexity/2021/4703820/

Nanetti, A., Razdi, Z., & Benvenuti, D. (2021). Crafting the next generation of web-based learning tools for manuscript artefacts. A focus on science, technology, and engineering codices, world maps, and archival documents in exhibition settings, in «SCIRES-IT (SCIentific RESearch and Information Technology) », 11(1), 97-114. http://www.sciresit.it/article/view/13537

WEB PLATFORM
https://engineeringhistoricalmemory.com/

- 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

Designing project work to solve Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), such as quality education, gender equality, peace, and partnerships for the goals, under the umbrella of the UN SDG symbol, which has been reproduced on the NTU Singapore School of ADM’s rooftop by the artist that realised the work in front of the UN building in Geneva. I hope it will be hosted by Ca’ Foscari University soon.

oral