Beatrice Milanesi: Digital Humanities Online Summer School

Thanks to the support of the Department, between June 16 and 27 I had the opportunity to attend the two-week online Summer School Digital Tools for Humanists 2025 organized by the Laboratory for Digital Culture at the University of Pisa, Italy. The Summer School was divided into two modules: Working on History for the first week and Working with AI for the second week. It was designed as an introductory course and an intensive exploration of different tools that recent technological developments have made available to humanists. 

Underneath my cover as a computer-illiterate classicist (my success rate in using the Department's printer is 1 in 4), I have long been intrigued by the new possibilities and questions that digital resources and tools are opening up in the Humanities and Classics. In one of my master's dissertations, I miraculously navigated a project that used data extracted from social media to investigate the general public's attitude toward some famous linguistic theories. With the providential help of shady YouTube video tutorials and stackoverflow.com (and after a few existential crises and a ton of regret), I managed to design a model for data collection, organization, and analysis that I was also able to apply recently in a seminar paper on the online dissemination and reception of archaeogenetic studies.

But innovation is always racing ahead, and in this field I have the agility of a beached manatee, so this Summer School proved to be the perfect opportunity to catch up on the development and improvement - and, in some cases, even on the mere existence- of various kinds of digital resources to support and share humanistic research. While some of the tools we explored, such as Geographic Information Systems, are far removed from my research interests and expertise, others, such as MedTator, a text annotation software where multiple users can collaborate in cross-annotation tasks, were a revelation: goodbye Excel!

The practical and collaborative approach of most of the lectures allowed me not only to interact with European and African colleagues of different ages, backgrounds, and professional backgrounds, but also to discover in concrete terms, beyond the tools themselves, what types of projects are being developed in the field of Digital Humanities, from the publication of online and annotated editions to the use of Artificial Intelligence in the didactic of Ancient Greek.

 Another strength of the Summer School and its practical component in this regard was the focus on the mental shift needed to develop, manage, improve, and tweak a digital project. As we saw in the lecture “Designing a Project in Digital Public History,” one of my favorites, humanists who want to make the most of the digital resources and tools available from a practical, communicative, academic, and ethical point of view must learn to “think outside the building,” outside the restricting but somewhat reassuring traditional guidelines, and to anticipate and manage new problems, whether technical or ethical. This last aspect in particular of Digital Humanities, together with their environmental sustainability, is still an open issue that I would like to explore more in the future. 

Some of the most recent and groundbreaking technological developments have had a significant impact on the Humanities, arousing as much enthusiasm as skepticism and disapproval. Thanks to this Summer School, I have taken a step forward in my training, which will hopefully enable me to use or not use new technological tools with the necessary awareness.