TOOLS AND METHODOLOGIES SEMINARS (SL) - MOD. 3

The curriculum in Linguistic Sciences is designed to provide theoretical knowledge and foster critical skills that enable a comprehensive understanding of linguistic phenomena in all their complexity. It aims to develop the capacity to design research projects focused on the acquisition and analysis of new data, with a view toward proposing applied interventions that have social and cultural impact. The curriculum encompasses a wide range of linguistic research perspectives, including formal, synchronic, and diachronic analysis, philology, sociolinguistics, computational linguistics, and language teaching, also applied to bilingual and bimodal contexts. These are addressed through experimental methodologies employing sophisticated instrumentation (such as eye-tracking and functional near-infrared spectroscopy, fNIRS) and advanced statistical analysis models.
This module is part of the doctoral program in Linguistic Sciences and aims to facilitate the acquisition and consolidation of research methodologies and tools related to Germanic languages from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives, as well as philological methodologies for the treatment of texts and Germanic cultural heritage, including digital and computational approaches.

- in-depth understanding of the most recent models of formal analysis of Germanic languages in synchronic and diachronic perspectives
- knowledge and ability to apply philological methodologies for textual processing, also digitally.
- knowledge of the research methods in the field of digital and computational 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.

The seminars are structured into two main thematic areas and one in-depth workshop:
Monday, 22 September 2025 (6 hours)
– Workshop on Ontologies for the Cultural Heritage
Prof. Marina Buzzoni (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice), Prof. Marilena Daquino (University of Bologna), Prof. Alessia Bardi (CNR-ISTI, Pisa) — 6 hours
Ontologies play a pivotal role in the management, preservation, and valorisation of cultural heritage by providing a formalised language for representing complex knowledge systems. Their capacity to structure and interlink heterogeneous data facilitates interoperability among archives, museums, and libraries. Furthermore, ontologies enhance information discovery and accessibility, thereby supporting both academic research and public engagement. This workshop will examine the principal applications, challenges, and future prospects of ontological approaches to Italian cultural heritage, with a specific focus on the ATLAS project. The workshop will also include a practical session (Datathon) tailored to doctoral students.
1. Tools and Methods in Synchronic and Diachronic Linguistics (with a focus on Germanic Languages)
– Prof. Chiara De Bastiani (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) — 6 hours
This module will explore corpora of early Germanic languages, with hands-on sessions addressing specific research questions. Particular emphasis will be placed on linguistic data annotation methods and tools, with the aim of fostering critical reflection on current methodological frameworks.
– Prof. Alessandra Giorgi (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice), Prof. Federica Cognola (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice), Prof. Nicholas Catasso (Bergische Universität Wuppertal), Prof. Marco Coniglio (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen) — 8 hours
The course will address selected issues in comparative linguistics, with a particular emphasis on Germanic languages. It will introduce investigative tools designed to describe synchronic linguistic variation and will examine phenomena of language change at the interface with information structure. Special attention will be given to historical stages of Germanic languages and to Germanic-origin minority languages spoken in Italy.
2. Tools and Methods for the Digital Treatment of Germanic Linguistic and Cultural Heritage
– Prof. Marina Buzzoni (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) — 8 hours
This module will investigate research infrastructures such as H2IOSC, an Italian initiative aimed at establishing a national open science infrastructure aligned with the European EOSC (European Open Science Cloud) principles. The project seeks to foster interdisciplinary collaboration, FAIR data sharing, and the enhancement of digital skills in research practices. Moreover, the course will introduce AI-based tools and methodologies for philological research.
– Prof. Paola Peratello (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) — 2 hours
The seminar "Advanced Tools and Methods for Digital Scholarly Editions" will cover the export of XML ALTO / XML PAGE files from eScriptorium to eXist-db. It will then introduce the eXist-db working environment and the transformation of XML ALTO / XML PAGE files into XML TEI. Finally, the seminar will present the visualisation of XML TEI files in TEI Publisher via eXist-db.

Selected bibliography

- Workshop on Ontologies for the Cultural Heritage
Doerr, M. (2003). The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model: An Ontological Approach to Semantic Interoperability of Metadata.
Carriero, V. et al. (2019). ArCo: The Italian Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graph.
Giacomini, S., Bardi, A., Buzzoni, M., Daquino, M., Del Gratta, R., Del Grosso, A. M., et al. (2025). ATLAS: Towards a Knowledge Graph of International Scholarly Research on the Italian Digital Cultural Heritage. In Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Information and Research Science Connecting to Digital and Library Science, pp. 1–13.

1. Tools and Methods in Synchronic and Diachronic Linguistics (with a focus on Germanic Languages)
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).
Catasso, Nicholas. (2021). How theoretical is your (historical) syntax? Towards a typology of Verb-Third in Early Old High German, in The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics (24), 1-48. Coniglio, Marco. (2022). On the adverbial origin of German modal particles. In X. Artiagoitia, A. Elordieta & S. Monforte (eds.), Discourse Particles. Syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and historical aspects. [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 276]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 13-39.
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
Taylor, A., Marcus, M., & Santorini, B. (2003). “The Penn treebank: an overview.” Treebanks: Building and using parsed corpora, 5-22.

2. Tools and Methods for the Digital Treatment of Germanic Linguistic and Cultural Heritage
Boschetti, Federico (2022). “Digitization of written sources”, https://digitaltools.labcd.unipi.it/wpcontent/uploads/2022/06/F.Boschetti_summer_school_pisa_2022.pdf
Calvelli, Lorenzo, Boschetti, Federico, and Tatiana Tommasi. 2023. “EpiSearch. Identifying Ancient Inscriptions in Epigraphic Manuscripts”. jdmdh:10417 - Journal of Data Mining & Digital Humanities, 26 décembre (2023). Documents historiques et reconnaissance automatique de texte, https://doi.org/10.46298/jdmdh.10417
eXist-db, https://exist-db.org/exist/apps/homepage/index.html
Pierazzo, Elena (2015). Digital scholarly editing: Theories, models and methods. Aldershot: Ashgate. TEI Publisher, https://teipublisher.com/exist/apps/tei-publisher-home/index.html
Sichera, Pierpaolo (2024). Overview and Progress of Project Activities – Work Package 5 – H2IOSC Spinelli, F. et al. (2024). Supporting digitally enhanced scientific workflows in a clustered Infrastructure: DARIAH IT and H2IOSC
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

The assessment of students’ acquisition of tools and methodologies will be carried out as part of the regular biannual evaluations required for doctoral candidates.

not present

The activities are not subject to formal grading

In-person interactive seminars

This subject deals with topics related to the macro-area "Human capital, health, education" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development