The course takes advantage of and empowers the perspective of digital revolution for enhancing new knowledge building and abilities about cultural data and information in a digital society. Its ambition is to meet the urgent demand of inclusiveness, pluralism and participation to cultural heritage identities, belongs and experiences. For this purpose, its main aim is to advance knowledge, expertise and skills in analysis, interpretation in an historical understanding of dynamics of change as well as spread of tangible and intangible cultural heritage through new cultural projects. It especially focuses on cities, in a sustainable development perspective, and urban history as well as on methodologies that entail digital humanities. In order to face, into a domain still under development, the great challenge to effectively improve an integration of digital technologies with humanities methodologies in the cultural heritage field, the program deals with a theoretical and practical approach for exploring digital format on cultural heritage. Although some digital tools are widely in use, developments are needed for improving quantitative and qualitative approaches to data as well as collaborative approaches and strict methodologies. A critical and accurate integration of digital approach is needed for the development of new rich and inclusive understandings to enable insights in the potential of cultural heritage for increasing public knowledge, awareness and resilience of cities and communities. The course - through both a theoretical and practical teachings - will enhance students’ understanding of urban heritage (including its characterization as historic landscapes) in the context of cities as physical, architectural, economic, political and social space, their history and impact nowadays as a shared multi-cultural and multi-ethnic heritage. It will enrich the capacity building analytical and critical perspectives in identifying processes, roots, and developments of the digital society by providing specific expertise in creating new cultural projects for cities and communities. The course will equip the students with a skill to select and use correct type of digital humanities tools depending on the scope, scale, and specific objectives of a heritage project. The contents will focus both on tangible heritage of cities and digital heritage to be identified and linked by a digital approach different through spatial scales, collections, heritage categories for diverse purposes and local specifications. Cultural heritage will be critically connected to its context in space and time to shape rich keys of interpretation of the past and, at the same time, create heritage exploitation in a sustainable urban development vision. Students will be asked to create a digital format as a project that will allows them to deep urban heritage cultural significance and fostering new multi-cultural and inclusive heritage understandings.

By integrating some key digital expertise into the digital heritage research and engaging with research infrastructure, students will learn how to provide innovative urban heritage enquiry and solutions for fostering new understandings and enhancing public knowledge on heritage in society. Teachings will enable to conceive cultural heritage project proposals – with an historical critical background – in digital environments, to address existing tools for a new heritage project design, to connect different elements and issues and different scales. Theoretical and practical learning will deal with understanding cultural heritage in contexts, both cultural historical and physical, and with re-creating lost context through digital tools for representing data and information. More specifically, the practice will allow students experiencing how to fairly analyse, repurpose and disseminate GLAM digital heritage and connect to real world.

Skills developed on some digital techniques and knowledge on data formats are important pre-requirements for the course. In particular, data management and FAIR data (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) and data visualisation; technical basis for shaping a database; abilities in data spatialization and georeferenced systems; some 3d modelling abilities could be also useful. Students will work their own laptops computer with basic drawing software installed.

The course focuses on a digital approach to the understanding, research and know how on tangible and intangible cultural heritage. It especially and in parallel on introduction to the Digital Heritage. It presents how research on the Humanities, and more specifically in the History field related to the built environment, the urban space and the landscape, can be improved by a digital approach and the use of digital technologies. The course deals with cities at different scales and especially digitised and increasingly born-digital cultural heritage to be properly exploited by integrating key digital expertise into the Humanities research and engaging with research infrastructures in the aim of taking advantage of and empowering a contribution to the the digital revolution by advancing interpretations of (multi) cultural heritage and spread of research, while increasing collaborative approaches. The course will investigate urban heritage within this scope. The course includes theoretical discussions on urban heritage, urban history, digital humanities, sustainable development and practical exercises in which students will form project groups of 2 or 3 persons. For the projects, the project groups will use Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) digital collections in order to enable humanities across the world of Cultural Heritage (CH) investigating the link between the digital materials and the physical space. They will use their digital skills (such as 3D models, video editing, webpage/mobile app creation, interactive maps, etc.) to collaboratively develop digital projects about their assigned case study to formulate and respond to a historic curiosity about the city. A specific attention will be paid to specific scenarios such as heritage of the cinema industries or industrial heritage in urban contexts. Students will exploit diverse tools such as digital storytelling and gamification to explore the links between urban heritage of different scales and digital materials of different formats. Theoretical and practical parts will develop in an integrated manner. The general distribution will be as follows: Introduction to cultural heritage and digital humanities (10 hours), Introduction to the case study (10 hours), Practice (40 hours).

For the practical exercises, the students will work in groups of 2 or 3 persons. Depending on the health measures, the course will take place in the classroom environment.

Students will be asked to and assisted in work on themes and methodologies for shaping a virtual environment useful to link diverse primary sources and to experience/design tools useful for their management. The course will be held in the classroom environment depending on the health measures suggested by the school administration. Students will have the opportunity to work on a case study in order to develop a cultural project.

R. TAMBORRINO (ed.), Digital Urban History: Telling the history of the City in the Age of the ICT Revolution, Croma, Roma 2014. A. BURDICK, et al., Digital_Humanities, MIT Press, Cambridge 2012 (especially the chapter 5: A Short Guide to the Digital Humanities). WELLER, T. (ed.), History in the digital age, London, Routledge, 2013. UNESCO. Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage, 2009: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000179529.page=2 . M. TERRAS, J. NYHAN AND E. VANHOUTTE (eds), Defining Digital Humanities. A Reader, Ashgate, Farnham, 2013.
 S. DUNN, A History of Place in the Digital Age. Oxon, Routledge, 2019. S. SCHREIBMAN, R. SIEMENS, J. UNSWORTH, A Companion to Digital Humanities. London, Blackwell, 2004. D. J. COGEN, Defining the Digital Humanities (Panel organized in Columbia University). 6 May 2011. https://youtu.be/Xu6Z1SoEZcc.

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Gli studenti e le studentesse con disabilità o con Disturbi Specifici di Apprendimento (DSA), oltre alla segnalazione tramite procedura informatizzata, sono invitati a comunicare anche direttamente al/la docente titolare dell'insegnamento, con un preavviso non inferiore ad una settimana dall'avvio della sessione d'esame, gli strumenti compensativi concordati con l'Unità Special Needs, al fine di permettere al/la docente la declinazione più idonea in riferimento alla specifica tipologia di esame.