130 research outputs found
Chapter 2. Polentone vs terrone
No full textThis article explores how the internal conflict between the Italian Northern and Southern regions' ideologies is linguistically apparent in the use of the discriminating words polentone (literally, polenta eater) attached to people from the North and terrone (literally, person from the land) referred to people from the South. The research hypothesis is that, although at first these terms appear to carry a similar derogatory connotation, terrone is in fact more offensive. It is argued here that such difference may find its roots in the Italian central government political strategies which, by historically favouring one part of the country to the disadvantage of the other, have factually aggravated the production and reproduction of discriminatory prejudices against the South. By using the "discourse-historical approach"(Wodak 2001), the study triangulates linguistic, social and historical data to unveil correlations between the discursive discrimination against Italian intra-migrants and the implicit ideologies circulated by governmental choices
Replication, evaluation and quantitative analysis in the DH era: Transparent digital practices and lessons learned from the development of the GeoNewsMiner
No full textThis contribution discusses the evaluation steps and concerted efforts towards transparency and replicability taken during the development of the GeoNewsMiner[1] (Viola et al 2019 - GNM), an interactive app that maps and visualizes geographical references in historical immigrant newspapers. It describes how the goal of achieving transparency and replicability influenced the methodological decisions made in the process as well as the lessons learned from the experience. The overarching aim is to contribute to the methodological foundations of DH, arguing in favour of clearer explanations of methods and practices both to engage less technical scholars and to advance the field as a whole.
[1] https://utrecht-university.shinyapps.io/GeoNewsMiner
DH Benelux Journal 4. The Humanities in a Digital World
Full text linkThe fourth volume of the DH Benelux Journal. This volume includes seven full-length, peer-reviewed articles that are based on accepted contributions to the 2021 virtual DH Benelux conference. Contents: 1. Editors' Preface (Wout Dillen, Margherita Fantoli, Marijn Koolen, Marieke van Erp); 2. Introduction: The Humanities in a Digital World (Lorella Viola, Jelena Prokic, Antske Fokkens, Tommaso Caselli); 3. A Game of Persistence, Self-doubt, and Curiosity: Surveying Code Literacy in Digital Humanities
(Elli Bleeker, Marijn Koolen, Kaspar Beelen, Liliana Melgar, Joris van Zundert, Sally Chambers); 4. Introducing the DHARPA Project: An Interdisciplinary Lab to Enable
Critical DH Practice (Angela R. Cunningham, Helena Jaskov, Sean Takats, Lorella Viola); 5. Examining a Multi Layered Approach for Classification of OCR Quality without Ground Truth (Mirjam Cuper); 6. Modeling Ontologies for Individual Artists: A Case Study of a Dutch Ceramic Glass Sculptor (Victor de Boer, Daan Raven, Erik Esmeijer, Johan Oome); 7. Judging a Book by its Criticism: A Digital Analysis of the Professional and Community Driven Literary Criticism of the Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis (Lore De Greve, Gunther Martens); 8. When No News is Bad News. News-Based Change Detection during COVID-19 (Kristoffer L. Nielbo, Frida Hæstrup, Kenneth C. Enevoldsen, Peter B. Vahlstrup, Rebekah B. Baglini, Andreas Roepstorff); 9. Combining Tools with Linked Data: a Social History Example (Ivo Zandhuis)
The Humanities in the Digital: Beyond Critical Digital Humanities
Full text linkThis open access book challenges the contemporary relevance of the current model of knowledge production. It argues that the full digitisation of society sharply accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic has added extreme complexity to the world, conclusively exposing the inadequacy of our current model of knowledge creation. Addressing many of the different ways in which reality has been transformed by technology – the pervasive adoption of big data, the fetishisation of algorithms and automation, and the digitalisation of education and research – Viola examines how the rigid conceptualisation in disciplines’ division and competition is complicit of promoting a narrative which has paired computational methods with exactness and neutrality whilst stigmatising consciousness and criticality as carriers of biases and inequality. Taking the humanities as a focal point, the author retraces schisms in the field between the humanities, the digital humanities and critical digital humanities; these are embedded, she argues, within old dichotomies: sciences vs humanities, digital vs non-digital and authentic vs non-authentic. Through the analysis of personal use cases and exploring a variety of applied contexts such as digital heritage practices, digital linguistic injustice, critical digital literacy and critical digital visualisation, the book shows a third way: knowledge creation in the digital
The GeoNewsMiner: An interactive spatial humanities tool to visualize geographical references in historical newspapers
No full textThe GeoNewsMiner (GNM) is an interactive tool that maps and visualizes geographical references in historical newspapers. As a use case, we analysed Italian immigrant newspapers published in the United States from 1898 to 1920, as collected in the corpus ChroniclItaly (Viola 2018). In order to offer new perspectives on the geographies of the past, we employed a state-of-the-art deep learning method to extract and disambiguate place names from historical newspapers. The two major advantages lie in its potential for text enriching: 1) they may be based on the historical context of a historical corpus; 2) they are able to recognize toponyms in a dynamic way, for instance as a geographical concept (Viola and Verheul 2020). For the development of the GNM, we used the deep learning sequence tagging tool developed by Riedl and Padó (2018). Afterwards, locations were geocoded by using the Google API. The tagged version of ChroniclItaly is available as an OA resource (ChroniclItaly 2.0, Viola 2019). Finally, to visualise and explore the data, we developed the GNM App. Unique to this tool is the possibility to aggregate the data according to a wide range of parameters (time; newspaper’s title; least/most mentioned places; absolute or relative frequency; aggregation on national, regional or city level). It is also possible to overlay historical maps that show the borders of selected years (1880, 1914, 1920, 1994), and download and share the data/results. One potential application of GNM is for example the possibility to reconstruct the “geographical agenda” of historical newspapers by analysing the changing geographical bias of the press. The full documentation of GNM is made available to the research community to facilitate transparency, reproducibility and replicability (Viola 2020). The app has much to recommend particularly to humanities scholars who are more and more confronted with the challenge of exploring collections larger than before and in a digital format
"Aspetti farmaco-tossicologici sull’impiego della fitoterapia negli animali domestici" nella Tavola Rotonda:
No full textPhytotherapy is one of the most utilized non conventional medicines (NCM) in veterinary medicine. It can be used to mitigate and prevent slight diseases and to support conventional medicine using allopathic drugs. The Author reports the phytoterapeutics most utilized in domestic animals, in which the use of phytotherapics is increasing, despite the prejudices of the academic world and of the veterinary practitioners.
The Author provides many examples of phytotheapic prescriptions to control different illness in domestic animals and idescribe some adverse effects
ChroniclItaly and ChroniclItaly 2.0: Digital Heritage to access narratives of migration
No full textpeer reviewedAlthough the voice of migrants and minorities has increasingly being heard in migration research, studies of past narratives of migration remain comparatively rare. The reason for this lies in the fact that accessing historical records of migrants’ personal accounts is technically difficult. Voicing the experiences and ‘inner life’ of migrants, the immigrant press represents a suitable compromise. This article presents ChroniclItaly (Viola 2018) and ChroniclItaly 2.0 (Viola 2019), two digital heritage collections of Italian immigrant newspapers published in the United States between 1898 and 1920. Both corpora include the digitized front pages of 4,810 issues of seven Italian newspapers’ titles and contain 16,624,571 words; ChroniclItaly 2.0, in particular, includes annotations for referential entities such as people, places and organizations. The material was collected from Chronicling America, an Internet-based directory of digitized newspapers published in the United States from 1789 to 1963. With their focus on the turn of the twentieth century, ChroniclItaly and ChroniclItaly 2.0 are valuable sources for studying past narratives of migration and for obtaining new insights into the migrants’ role in the history of modern states. This article describes the context, rationale, data design and accessibility of the archives as well as research applications
DeXTER: A post-authentic approach to heritage visualisation
No full textCultural heritage institutions and academics are resorting
more and more to visual representations of cultural heritage
material as a way to enhance access to collections for
users’ appreciation and research purposes (Windhager et
al., 2019). However, scholars have pointed out (Drucker,
2011; 2013; 2014; 2020; Windhager et al., 2019) how a
critical approach to visualisation is still largely missing and
how on the whole, user-interface (UI) design still shows
a functional and task-driven approach, oriented towards
satisfying a need for information rather than towards
eliciting curiosity, engagement and reflection. With this
presentation, I aim to contribute to the urgent need for the
establishment of a critical data and visualisation literacy in
current task-driven approaches to interface design which
continue to see the user as a consumer and to operate within
a problem solver model. Drawing on critical posthumanities
(Braidotti, 2017; 2019), I here propose a critical framework
to digital cultural heritage and digital cultural heritage
visualisation. With this approach —which I labelled “postauthentic
framework” (Viola, 2021) —I want to initiate a
discussion and critique of the fetishization of empriricism
and technical objectivity in digital knowledge creation.
To exemplify how the post-authentic framework works in
practice, I present the design choices for developing the tool
DeXTER – DeepteXTminER, an interactive visualisation
app to explore enriched cultural heritage material. The
discussion will revolve around the challenges facing
product design, with specific reference to visualising the
ambiguities and uncertainties of network analysis (NA)
and sentiment analysis (SA). DeXTER is currently loaded
with Chroniclitaly 3.0 (Viola and Fiscarelli, 2021a), a
digital heritage collection of Italian American newspapers
published in the USA by Italian immigrants between 1897
and 1936
DeXTER (DeepTextMiner): A deep learning, critical workflow to contextually enrich digital collections and visualise them
No full text<p><a href="https://github.com/lorellav/DeXTER-DeepTextMiner/files/6197656/Source.code.zip">Source code.zip</a></p>
<p>DeXTER (DeepTextMiner) is a deep learning, critical workflow to contextually enrich digital collections and interactively visualise them. It is task-oriented (as opposed to result-oriented) and it is is designed to be generalisable and interoperable (i.e., it is data-set independent). To implement its interoperability, we used language-agnostic algorithms to encourage scholars to replicate the methodology with their own data-sets. Currently, DeXTER is based on <a href="http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4596345"><em>ChroniclItaly 3.0</em></a> (Viola and Fiscarelli 2021), an open access digital heritage collection of Italian immigrant newspapers published in the United States from 1898 to 1936. Methodologically, 1) we experimented with different state-of-the-art NLP techniques (e.g., deep learning Named Entity Recognition, deep learning sentiment analysis) to enrich the collection with further layers of information (e.g., referential, geographical, emotional, relational); and 2) we developed a <a href="https://shiny.rstudio.com/">Shiny app</a> to visualise the enriched material and facilitate analysis in an intuitive, interactive, and reproduceable way. This documentation is the step-by-step description of the project. You can find the code and the tutorial in the code folder of this repository. Part of this documentation is taken from <a href="http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2810/paper5.pdf">Viola and Fiscarelli</a> (2021).</p>
- …
