Students connect with cultural history through digital humanities

Digital humanities is a field that applies innovative digital tools to traditional humanities disciplines, such as art, literature and history.

In the School of International Letters and Cultures, Serena Ferrando, professor of environmental and Italian humanities, frequently uses digital humanities as the basis for her classes, including ITA 494: City of Water — Uncovering Milan’s Aquatic Geographies, which wrapped up last semester.

Another one of Ferrando’s courses, titled “Noisemakers!”, utilized digital humanities when students embarked on an overnight research trip to Taliesin West. This experience even inspired students to continue this research for their capstone project and honors thesis. Ferrando said the course is very versatile because it combines Italian, environmental humanities and digital humanities.

Digital humanities allows cultural history to be more engaging and accessible to the public through offerings such as virtual tours and other multimedia elements. It is also a powerful tool used for analyzing data and historical records while encouraging collaboration between students of different majors to learn and grow from each other’s expertise.

Many STEM majors, for example, enroll in Ferrando’s courses.

“I want them to, through the process of doing digital humanities, approach humanities-based questions through nontraditional approaches. And to understand that their contribution to questions that are usually discussed in humanities-based courses are absolutely valuable," Ferrando said. "And I also want my humanities-based students to understand that you can also utilize techniques or platforms or tools from STEM fields to explore humanities-based questions. So that's what the whole digital humanities is.”

The cultural conservation of water

The City of Water course expands students' skill set and ability to think critically by using digital methods to examine humanities-based materials, such as photographs, maps, poems, graphic novels, music and historical accounts that are related to the history of the canals in Milan, Italy. 

These elements are used by students to create short texts, images, video clips or audio files that reveal the historical layers of Milan’s waterways. They then put this information into a digital map using software like Neatline or Story Maps. The course also gave rise to the Navigli Project, an online exhibit accessible to the public that displays the students' work.

Students gain an array of skills through this project that can be applied to other courses and their professional careers. By creating cultural content through maps of Milan, students learn to think more critically and become proficient in using digital tools and methods to analyze Italian literature, history, philosophy and art as it relates to elements of water. 

Students also find parallels between what happened with the canals in Milan and the canals in Phoenix. 

“It resonates with the students here because Milan had a lot of water canals until the 1930s. It was a huge network of them, and then they were covered, and now in Milan, you only have two small sections of the canals that are still visible. And the same thing happened here," Ferrando said. "Phoenix was a city of canals and so it's the connection between what happened in Milan, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. So there are projects in the digital humanities that actually trace the former canals of Phoenix.”

The waterways in Milan were used for communication and the transportation of goods, but there is so much more cultural history surrounding it. The City of Water course is valuable for students because it teaches them how to work collaboratively while investigating Milan’s literacy, history, and geography as it relates to the canals. 

According to the article, "The Navigli Project: A Digital Uncovering of Milan’s Aquatic Waterways," written by Ferrando, the project encourages the cultural conservation of water and water education in Milan.

The class gives students the opportunity to be involved in different social, cultural and political conversations with the people of Milan, with the information they discover and map, despite being an ocean away.

“So what we offer is a conversation with the people in Milan that can be informed with our work. They can actually see what the canals were at the time and so we can be from this part of the ocean, we can be part of conversations about the geographical territory on the other side of the world in Italy,” Ferrando said.

The Navigli Project started eight years ago from the City of Water course. Once the course ended, students wanted to keep mapping the waters of Milan, so Ferrando agreed to continue working with them on an exhibit, now known as the Navigli Project. Each semester, students add what they map to the project if it has yet to be replicated. Ferrando said they probably have over 200 records.  

“It was never my intention to create something like that, but it evolved organically from the student's work,” Ferrando said.

Embracing sound via 'Noisemaking!'

Ferrando also uses digital humanities as the basis for ITA 494: Noisemakers! Tracing Origins of Modern Music-Italy. Students examine the acoustic signature of Italy’s musical-literacy history, but the course also challenges students to study the characteristics of their local environment, including Tempe and the ASU campus.

They then create sound maps of their findings using various forms of digital humanities. Some sources could be noise clips, manifestos and scholarly works.

Ferrando became interested in sound technology when taking sound engineering classes at Stanford University for her PhD.

“I just loved all the gear and all the tools that we had in this wonderful recording studio that was available to me at Stanford. And I thought, but I can still utilize this expertise in the academic setting,” she said.

Her ongoing research in this area inspired her to teach courses on noise, such as Noisemakers!, based on the origins of modern Italian music. Ferrando was also interested in noise because it often has a negative connotation, but she wanted to explore its positive sides as well.

One of the highlights of the course was an overnight research trip to Taliesin West, where students worked on field research and collected data to map the desert, sound and noise, using different types of digital mapping software. They created sound walks, a walk focused on listening to the environment. 

“For me as an educator and a professor, the most important thing is that students learn how to read around them. They should be able to read the environment. They should be able to read a soundscape," Ferrando said. "And that's the whole purpose of a sound walk, is that very often our hearing is very selective, and our reading is also very selective. And instead, the idea of a sound walk is that you completely open your ears to any type of sound or noise or anything that you might be hearing so you're not selectively listening; you're just hearing.”

One graduate student made a series of podcasts about sound in the environment based on his experience at Taliesin West for their capstone project for the certificate in Digital Humanities. Another student conducted a thesis defense on the subject, creating a digital machine called a Rhythm Harmanzier.