Arianna Ciula:   Historical sources through the lenses ...
Channel: Helmut W. Klug
Date: 06/09/2016

Historical sources through the lenses of Digital Humanities projects: what do we see?

In this talk Arianna Ciula will use the metaphor of optical lenses as scientific instrument and as device of cultural production to dwell onto the role of technology across various digital humanities projects dealing with the study of historical sources. Not only our tools (the lenses) makes us see the objects under study in detailed, expanded or even distorted form, but they also make us aware of the instruments of study (the lenses themselves) and of our own role as participatory observers. The power and limits of technology are hence a call to awake our sense of past, present and future agency of cultural production and historical interpretation.

Arianna Ciula is a Research Facilitator at the Department of Humanities, University of Roehampton, where she supports the departmental research and enterprise strategies and actively contributes to its research profile and networks. Arianna graduated with BA (Hons) in Communication sciences (computational linguistics) at the University of Siena in 2001. She received an MA in Applied Computing in the Humanities from King’s College London in 2004 and was awarded her PhD in Manuscript and Book Studies from the University of Siena in 2005. Her personal research interests focus on the modelling of scholarly digital resources related to primary sources. She lectured and published on humanities computing, in particular on digital palaeography and digital philology; she has organised conferences and workshops in digital humanities, and is an active member of its international community.