Tradigital Humanities: Experiences in a context of change.

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1344/IHE2023.136.1

Keywords:

Tradigital humanities, Téchne, Ancient History, Archaeology, Rome.

Abstract

Assuming one of Seneca’s proverbs — while we teach, we learn — we must understand the historian’s trade as a profession in continuous renewal, nurturing ourselves with new aspects that improve the methodology and techniques of science, while discarding those that become obsolete. For three decades, the provision of methodologies originating from other disciplines, such as computer science and Humanities studies, have been converging into the discipline known as Digital Humanities.

Although these computational techniques have introduced new methods for the identification of patterns in data and promise to accelerate the processes of analysing the growing mass of data, they diverge from the traditional narrative and its methods. In this sense, recent experiences allow us to discuss the benefits and limits of the link between traditional methods and techniques on the one hand, and those that are computational on the other, when preparing scientific results. Thus, we believe that without losing sight of the historian’s basic essence of continually immersing themselves in the reading and analysis of sources, the paradigm shifts of science can be assumed adopting this new technique.

Now, with perspective, we look at the limits that convergence itself offers, and here present our most recent experience to improve its performance.

Author Biography

Jordi PÉREZ GONZÁLEZ

Jordi Pérez González is Assistant Professor at University of Alcalá (Ancient History Area). He received his doctorate from the University of Barcelona as well as the Extraordinary Doctorate Award (2017). He has carried out research stays at the universities of Rome La Sapienza (2017, 2022), Verona (2018), and Macerata (2019/20), financed by the European Commission and by the Ministerio de Universidades (‘José Castillejo’). He has been a Juan de la Cierva—Training postdoctoral researcher at the University of Girona (2020-23, under the academic supervision of Research Professor ICREA, Toni Ñaco). His most recent research focuses on the consumption of luxuries among the Roman elite, the distribution of food and the epigraphy of its containers, in addition to methodological innovations in Humanities studies. Among his publications, of note is the book awarded with the Géza Alföldy 2021 prize Sumptuary Specialists and Consumer Elites in Rome’s world order (Instrumenta), The Romans before adversity (with J.M. Bermúdez —Aracne editrice), and the edition, together with J. Remesal, in this series — Access Archaeology, Arqueología y Téchne. Métodos formales, nuevos enfoques / Archaeology and Techne. Formal methods, new approaches, and together with Filipe N. Silva and J.M. Bermúdez from Historia Antigua en diálogo. Humanidades Digitales e innovaciones metodológicas and with Lluís Pons, De luxuria propagata romana aetate. Roman luxury in its many forms.

Published

2024-02-20

Issue

Section

ARTICLES