by Chiara Aiola, Project Manager and Software Engineer specialising in the design and development of digital platforms for the Digital Humanities.
Net7 and Muruca: building digital platforms for humanities research
The image that comes to mind is always the same: people with their arms full of folders crammed with every kind of material — manuscripts, images, books, loose sheets — asking me: “What do we do with all this?”
In reality, the research groups who come to us know exactly what their work is meant to achieve. What they often lack is the technical language to translate those needs into software requirements.
That is where I come in. I’m Chiara, and I come from a long way back: from one of the first degree courses in Informatica Umanistica — humanities computing — in Pisa, the city where I work today.
Don’t ask me what the Digital Humanities are!
The answer to that question is itself a subject of study. To paraphrase Wikipedia, humanities computing (or digital humanities) is a field that applies computing and multimedia tools to the humanities disciplines, concerned in particular with how data is represented, how the stages of research are formalised and how findings are disseminated (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_humanities, because the first thing I learned was always to cite your sources).
My work today is building platforms that organise a digital archive of heterogeneous material — material that almost always has a physical counterpart: a manuscript held in a library in France, for example, or bibliographical repertories, photographs, inscriptions. The task is then to relate these objects to one another, to make increasingly complex searches possible and, finally, to produce new content.
What is distinctive about these projects? Why is a dedicated role needed?
Like every field of study, the humanities have a language of their own, often perceived as remote and obscure by anyone with a purely scientific training. Terms such as “metrical scansion”, “collation” or “code” — which for a philologist means a manuscript, a codex, not a line of Python — provoke mistrust and confusion in a software engineer at first encounter, and sometimes even a closer look isn’t enough to dispel the doubts.
My job is precisely this: to translate from one “language” into the other. The client feels supported throughout the design of their application, and the developers know exactly what the specific requirement is.
The Digital Humanities also have software, protocols and standards of their own. Knowing them, and knowing how to integrate them, is part of my work.
Net7’s added value
Net7 has been running projects with universities and research centres for more than 20 years, and over time its experience has widened to other sectors too. That allows it to bring to Digital Humanities projects skills developed elsewhere: data visualisation, interface design and, more recently, artificial intelligence.
Some of the most interesting projects I have worked on
Petrarca Online, the pilot project of my career in this field: a monographic portal dedicated to the medieval poet.
In the field of chivalric literature, all the platforms of the Mapping Chivalry and TeSpa – El teatro español (1570–1700) y Europa projects: for both we built bibliographical databases and digital editions with image and text side by side, along with tools for investigating and searching chivalric motifs in Spanish works, based on NLP analysis of the corpus.
With Serica we then opened up to the study of relations between Europe and the East, though it was not the only project to follow the Silk Roads.
Finally, there is the work still in progress: an ambitious project on the digitisation of the Slavonic corpus of Maximus the Greek, and the database of medieval graffiti that a group of scholars, holders of an ERC grant, is cataloguing across Italy.
But does it start from scratch every time?
No — and this is where the real innovation lies. In recent years we have worked to factor out the elements common to the various projects, and that is how MURUCA was born: the framework developed by Net7 for the Digital Humanities. This extremely versatile tool allows us to manage projects that differ in subject matter but are similar in architecture, to optimise the code and to keep it constantly up to date.
In the end, that is what my work amounts to: deciphering one code in order to write another.
