The project paper “Fifty Years of European History through the Lens of Computational Linguistics: the De Gasperi Project” by Rachele Sprugnoli, Sara Tonelli, Giovanni Moretti, and Stefano Menini is now online in the Special Issue on “Digital Humanities and Computational Linguistics” of the Italian Journal of Computational Linguistics (IJCoL).
The introduction to the special issue, written by the guest editors – Sara Tonelli and John Nerbonne – is online as well.
The journal is open access and available both on the AILC website and on the website of the Academia University Press.
Abstract
In 2013 a collaboration was started between the Digital Humanities research unit and the Italian-German Historical institute at Fondazione Bruno Kessler, whose goal was to develop tools and strategies to give new insight into the public documents written by Alcide De Gasperi. Through the analysis of textual occurrences, semantic structures, and temporal patterns, the project, ending in 2017, has investigated the formation and evolution of De Gasperi’s political action and the rhetorical discourse that accompanied its developments. Research of this kind has contributed to better understanding De Gasperi’s thoughts, the links between his language and his political views and culture, and the instruments of his communication. On the other hand, it allows the design and development of automated research tools for the political domain. This is a distinctly interdisciplinary research project, in which historical inquiry interacts with methods of linguistic analysis and with information and communication technologies.
