The digital culture laboratory is an Interdepartmental centre of education and research, according to the Article 39 of the Statute of the University of Pisa. Within the laboratory collaborate teachers of five different university departments and many independent students, brought together by the desire of developing projects, skills and knowledges through which it is possible to join together the humanistic and the informatics fields.
The Laboratory is meant to work like a digital workshop, a Digicraft, in the sense that it must think and work on projects the same as a reinassance workshop receiving the commission of a handiwork.
In fact, in a Digicraft, different competences and capacities are integrated with the ones of a “master”, who has the general idea of the handiwork, and who is the responsible person of the project. However, it must be noted that the master themselves need to work along with a group aimed at the project’s development so that the latter can be effectively carried out.
Indeed, within the production of a digital project there are different people who collaborate in our laboratory: not only experts in diverse subjects, but also PhD students, undergraduate and graduate students and trainees, who usually have greater skills on specific research tools and techniques than the master themselves . The groups working in the laboratory are always interdisciplinary and open, because such is the nature of every project belonging to Digital Humanities, which itself basically needs different kinds of tools and skills and also a dialogue among the various disciplines involved.
The laboratory has also the aim to promote researches able to answer to the changes that the continuous technological innovation brings to the cultural sector. It does that by elaborating models and languages which can interpret a changing world. The notion of Digital Humanities includes the diligence towards the conservation and the transmission of the cultural property by the new medias and the study on the contents’ evolution, determined by the new medias. The ambits that we favor are the following ones:
- E-learning: contents and technologies for the remote formation (open source platforms, didactic social network, virtual didactic places, audio-video podcasting)
- Codification of scripts, digital edition of scripts, digital philology
Digital art, graphic and design - Design of web sites and interfaces centered on the user, usability and accessibility
- assessment of interfaces
- 3d modeling, virtual places
- Historical and archeological GIS
- Digital libraries and digital archives
- Web communities, platforms for the community work
- Web marketing by social webs
- analysis and visualization of data
- Text analysis, computational linguistics
- Knowledge management and strategies for contents’ delivery on different platforms
- Online journalism
- Multimedial and multimodal production, graphic, video, audio, videogames
- E-book’s production
- Contents for mobile guides with a augmented reality
- Videos for didactic and scientific communication