The Laboratory has had a long gestation in the Degree’s Corse of humanistic informatics and of the ex-CISIAU (interdepartmental center of informatics services for humanistic area). The degree’s course is affluent, the only one in Italy, in the formation of a new discipline which has a good acceptance in the market and which has a strong reply in the international ambit, the Digital Humanities’ sector.
The ex-CISIAU, now united with the POLO 4 of SID, also thanks to the strong synergies developed with teachers and students, it distinguish itself in the last few years because it operated intensively and profitable in the sectors of e-learning and communication, serving different informatics and humanistic needs- Specifically the former Faculty of Literature and Philosophy and Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures. In particular it:
Prepared web sites dedicated (based on Content Management System) per Departments, per Degree’s schools and per single projects
Prepared and looked after, since 2007, an open source platform for the e-learning (Moodle) that has been successful between students and teachers also outside of the humanistic area
Prepared and look after some essential information services for the humanistic area, for example the Omero portal for the didactic and the news service connected with a TV display
Sustained the opening and the management of the University of Pisa’s page iTunesU
Collaborated with the office of communication of the Ateneo, because of the communication by videos and web
In all of this it wasn0t always simple to distinguish the “service” activity required at CISIAU and the one most targeted for research and training, Both because the three activities are naturally interrelated, and because CISIAU has also become a reference point for all those humanities teachers who intended to use the new technologies significantly in their research (for example, web hosting for Their projects and providing qualified advice to this end). It follows that for a long time, the laboratory developed within CISIAU (now SID 4th Polo) is no longer just a service center and needs to adapt its profile to the proven vocation. At the same time, several teachers and researchers from the humanities and sciences have been in a position to respond positively to requests for high cultural content from outside (public and private bodies) without having a suitable structure for purpose and statute. This has happened repeatedly – and comprehensibly – for the teachers members of the Degree Program in Humanities Informatics who have submitted funding applications for virtual reality projects, historical-archaeological GIS, e-learning and museum activities On encoding texts, sometimes meeting difficulties in deciding which structure to logically support to carry out the projects themselves. Such experiences have also occurred for teachers of other degree programs in so far as the digital world concerned, influenced and transformed the methodologies and objects of its studies. This is not a trivial question of a logistical or administrative issue, but to pursue a certain consistency between form and content as a result of the effects that the digital revolution itself is having not only in the humanities field and in social sciences, but also in those of all Theoretical and applied sciences: The multiplication of truly interdisciplinary research requires the creation of an interdisciplinary management center.