Digital Literary and Cultural Studies: State of the Art and Perspectives

  • Fabio Ciotti
Keywords: Digital Humanities, Formal ontology, Distant reading, Digital methods, Modeling

Abstract

Over the last decade Digital Humanities has ceased being a “niche discipline” and have become a major phenomenon in academic and cultural debate. Significant scientific results and outcomes have been achieved, and fundamental research infrastructures have been realized. Despite these far-reaching outcomes, Digital Humanities still does not have a satisfactory influence in the traditional disciplinary fields. We need to find new methods to deal with cultural artifacts and texts. Amongst the many emerging research fields in the DH, two come forth as the most promising and interesting: Big Data and distant reading; Semantic Web and Linked Open Data. In my paper I will argue that Big Data in the Humanities, although very promising, have some critical issues, and I will propose the idea of a Semantic Cultural and Literary Web, a collaborative infrastructure based on ontology driven semantic annotation of primary resources.

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Author Biography

Fabio Ciotti
Fabio Ciotti is Assistant Professor at the University of Roma Tor Vergata, where he teaches Digital Literary Studies and Theory of Literature. He is President of the Associazione per l'Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale (AIUCD, the Italian digital humanities association); elected member in the TEI Consortium Technical Council and in the EADH (European Association of Digital Humanities) Executive Board. His scientific and research work covers various aspects and themes of Digital Humanities and Literary Studies, both from the theoretical and the practical point of view: the applications of computational methods to the analysis of narrative texts; digital text encoding and representation; applications of XML and TEI technologies to literary computing; modeling and creation of digital libraries; applications of new media and computer mediated communication to Humanities research and teaching. Recently his research interests concern the application of Semantic Web/Linked data principles and technologies to humanities digital libraries and textual corpora. He is interested in particular in ontologies for the semantic analysis of literary texts and for the semantics of markup languages.

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How to Cite
Ciotti, F. (1). Digital Literary and Cultural Studies: State of the Art and Perspectives. Between, 4(8). https://doi.org/10.13125/2039-6597/1392
Section
Between Literature and Digital Culture: Intersections and Contaminations