Humanities and Their Methods in the Digital Ecosystem

AIUCD 2014, the third AIUCD (Associazione per l’Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale ) Annual Conference, was devoted to discussing the role of Digital Humanities in the current research practices of the traditional humanities disciplines. The introduction of computational methods prompted a new characterization of the methodology and the theoretical foundations of the human sciences and a new conceptual understanding of the traditional disciplines. Art, archeology, philology, philosophy, linguistics, bibliography, history, archival sciences and diplomatics, as well as social and communication sciences, avail themselves of computational methods to formalize their research questions, and to innovate their practices and procedures. A profound reorganization of disciplinary canons is therefore implied. New emerging notions such as Semantic web, Linked Open Data, digital libraries, digital archives, digital museum collections, information architecture, information visualization have turned into key issues of humanities research. A close comparison of research procedures in the traditional disciplines and in the digital humanities becomes inevitable to detect concurrencies and to renew their tools and methods from a new interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspective. We invited therefore submissions related, but not confined to the following topics: — Digital humanities and the traditional disciplines — Computational concepts and methods in the humanities research practices — Computational methods and their impact on the traditional methodologies — The emergence of new disciplinary paradigms