The course focuses on a cross-sector field and presents how digital technologies can be applied to the Humanities that are a wide range of fields linkable to architecture. The teaching deals with the methodologies of the Digital Humanities especially applied to the history of the architecture, and the history of the city and the territory. On the matter of the Master Course this course focuses on cultural and social sustainable development: how to use the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in order to easily access and make understandable history, as well as Social Housing and Industrial Heritage to be reused in the city nowadays.
The main tasks of this teaching are both theoretical and practical: on one hand a theoretical learning of the methodologies through an introduction to the related literature, and the discussion of cases studies of Digital History; on the other hand a practical experience to apply some of these methodologies to a case study through a research training.

The expected learning outcomes of the course concern notions on the main area of the Digital History, especially applied to the Built and Humanized Environment, as well as notions of the History of the Architecture and the Historical Urban Landscapes at the 20th Century. Related to the case study, the expected learning outcomes concern the correct use of traditional and digital sources and tools to make a historical research and to present its outcomes. Students will develop abilities in a strict approach to the matter, and creativity for conceiving and presenting their research.
The student is expected to develop peculiar expertise in producing and understanding how to present historical contents with Digital Humanities methodologies, and how to recognize links between sources and digital presentation of the research. He/She will become able to study an urban area in a diachronic perspective with digital historical approach by using direct and indirect sources, to find data and interpret data in an historical perspective, and to use them for virtual re-constructions of the historical process of the changes. He/she finally will be able to adopt this approach in collecting and visualising data, and in creating an historical storytelling scientifically based on sources.

The students are expected starting the course with some previous basics on historical culture, on digital architectural drawing and 3d modeling (this course doesn’t teach 3Dmodeling!), and basics of softwares AutoCAD, e SketchUp, o 3DStudio Max, o Revit, o Blender, o Rhino

The course focuses on theoretical lessons on Digital Humanities presenting the interdisciplinary cultural debate, and methodologies. It includes the presentation and the analysis of case studies on historical spatialisation and visualisation of historical contents and data for different uses and users. It will present digital historical products and digital platforms online and on site, such as virtual museums, databases, GIS, 3D models, websites by analysing the historical sources and the historical interpretation through the use of the tools (20 hours). After this starting the course deals with lessons on "Turin as an industrial city at its beginnings: factories and housing". This part of the program will present the subject as a case study in the context of the History of the Western 19th-20th Century Architecture and City by focusing the birth of the industrial city, and the architecture for workplaces and for social housing. A second teacher could teach this part of the course (20 hours). At the same times the matter will be developed also by a research training on peculiar case studies (40 hours).

The theoretical concepts listed above will be taught by teaching lessons and coordinating workshops involving students in debate, experience, research and creation. Some visits will be organized in the period of the course (i.e. Biennale of Venice). The research training is delivered as a workshop and concerns little groups of 3 students applying methodologies to a given case study. Teacher will give digitised drawings and information to start their research. The students, regularly assisted will collect data, interpret sources and visualize historical information on a factory or a social housing within the context of its block and urban area.

R. Tamborrino (ed.), Telling the history of the city in the Age of the ICT Revolution, Rome: CROMA-Università di Roma Tre, 2014
A. Burdick, J. Drucker, P. Lunenfeld, And T. Presner, J. Schnapp, Digital_Humanities, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012 https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/9780262018470_Open_Access_Edition.pdf


About the case study:
T. Hall, Cities of tomorrow: an intellectual history of urban planning and design since 1880, Chichester: Wiley, 2014
U. Levra (ed.), Storia di Torino. Da capitale politica a capitale industriale, 1864-1915, vol. 7, Turin: Einaudi, 2001
http://www.museotorino.it/resources/pdf/books/148/#/1/

Ancillary readings:
F. Bandarin, R.van Oers, Historical Urban Landscapes menaging heritage in an urban century, Jhon Wiley &Sons, 2012
D. Calabi, Storia della città. L'età contemporanea, Venice: Marsilio, 2005
V. Comoli, Torino, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1983
M. A. Giusti, R. Tamborrino, Guide to the Piedmont Architecture of the 20th Century (1902-2006), Turin: Allemandi, 2008
J. Guldi, ‘What is the Spatial Turn?’, Spatial Humanities, Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship, University of Virginia, http://spatial.scholarslab.org/spatial-turn/.
R. Tamborrino, ‘The Public Use of History in the Digital Society’, in Digitcult (May 2016), pp. 49-58, http://www.lim.di.unimi.it/subsites/digitcult/index.php/dc/article/view/39/31
R. Tamborrino, G. Zucconi (eds.), Lo spazio narrabile. Scritti di storia della città in onore di Donatella Calabi, Macerata: Quodlibet, 2014
R. Tamborrino, ‘Searching for a state-of-the-art public space: city museums among archives and networks’, Planning Perspectives (UK), vol. 27, n.3 (July 2012): 463-473.
J. Theibault, Visualization and Historical Arguments, in J. Dougherty-K. Nawrotzki (eds.), Writing History in the Digital Age, Ann Arbour: The University of Michigan Press, 2013, pp. 173-185

The student will deliver (when the exam will be fixed): all digital products of his/her research including a report on sources and methodologies. In the report students are requested to specify fully the link to each source of information available for each digital product (hypertexts, movies, animations). The same day of the delivering of the materials mentioned above, the students will face a written test on theoretical contents of the course (4 questions). The teachers will evaluate the written tests and the deliverables; at the end of this evaluation, students will be admitted to show and discuss the achieved results during the group activity, by means of an oral presentation. Each student will be individually evaluated by considering the wisdom autonomy, the communication ability and the specific abilities achieved during the team work. The final score will be the mean of the written and practical tests.