The Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge second cycle degree is a multi-disciplinary programme designed with the intention to promote knowledge integration and valorise advanced transversal competencies.
Overtime, the words Digital Humanities (DH) have come to refer to a polyhedral dimension that here indicates the study of computer thought in the management of heterogeneous resources (texts, documents, audio-visual material, multi-media data, etc.).
The second cycle degree programme focuses on valorising information to achieve knowledge; to this end, during the two-year programme, students need not only to acquire the expertise required to manage and edit, old and modern books, archived documents and process cultural, artistic and museum resources, but also the competence necessary to manage the documentation using the information systems of organisations, institutes, bodies and companies, in order to oversee the data's entire life cycle (data curation), with the continued ability to reinterpret the role and purpose of the humanities.
This also means acknowledging the role of the concept of information science in a wider context, which leads to consider the relation between humanities and computing methods. The social, cultural and philosophical aspects of information become part of the knowledge adding value to the programme.
This vision requires adopting a teaching perspective that brings digital component and knowledge of humanities together, not as a simple association between disciplines, but with deep integration and hybridization in mind.
Therefore, while it is essential to provide students with principles to process and represent information and knowledge, which they will require to be able to plan and create complex digital objects, these principles must be accompanied by a stronger humanistic approach to data, from a literary/philology and linguistic point of view, as well as from a general historical/cultural point of view. These competencies need to be completed with the knowledge required to oversee an entire project: the legal aspects with reference to digital documents; the economic aspects in connection with marketing and business; the communication aspects with particular regard to the social media context; and lastly the aspects concerning the complex relation between humanities and computing.
Humanities – in this context considered particularly in connection with literature, philology, archive keeping, bibliography and museology, philosophy and history, linguistics and communication – need to be reinterpreted as both competencies and knowledge factors. The objective of the information technology/computing approach is to valorise these sectors and contribute to rethinking research methods to bring new value to knowledge: organisation, manipulation, representation and extraction of new knowledge.
Therefore, the programme will have to be structured in order to provide students with knowledge and competence in the following areas:
1. information technology – in particular, teaching activities have the following learning objectives: programming principles and languages; data modelling and multi-media database design; design and creation of web application and interface management; extraction and representation of data; production of multimedia applications in a cultural heritage context;
2. literary, linguistic, historical/cultural and artistic, in a digital context – In particular, teaching activities have the following learning objectives: digital representation of humanities texts; management and valorisation of the cultural heritage of archives, libraries and museums; digital editing and issues related with editing text, documents and other media; acquisition and extraction of information from text corpora;
3. complementary: economy, law and communication – in particular, teaching activities have the following learning objectives: web and digital marketing; management strategies; start-up and self-entrepreneurship procedures; web project planning; social media; communication principals in heterogeneous digital contexts; issues connected with multimedia digital writing and writing for the web; web data analysis methods; intellectual property management in a digital context; legal issues in relation to open access and knowledge access.
The first year of the programme focuses on acquiring knowledge in the first two areas. Instead, the second year aims to provide the additional competencies necessary to strengthen students' education, i.e. the activities included in the third area.