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CFI lecture: Primary Sources of the 21s Century: A case study of university websites

On 2 June CFI-visiting PhD fellow Federico Nanni will lecture about Primary Sources of the 21s Century: A case study of university websites.

Federico Nanni

"IBM remarked that in 2012 2.5 quintillion bytes of data were created each day, so much that 90% of the data in the World Wide Web today has been produced in the last two years alone. Therefore, it is evident that being able to guarantee precise access to all kinds of information available online is one of the most important tasks of these decades. However, as we all know, the exponential increase of digital information is not the only problem which researchers interested in studying the Web have to deal with; being able of facing the volatility of documents born digital and studying them in a diachronic perspective, have become other fundamental tasks.

Taking all these issues into account, in my presentation I will emphasize both the difficulties and the potentialities that emerge when historians have to work with documents that are digitally created. Specifically, I will present my case of study (university websites), I will remark the usefulness of Natural Language Processing and Text Mining techniques in analyzing these sources and I will stress the importance of re-thinking traditional historical methods."

Federico Nanni is a PhD Student at Science, Technology and Society, CIS – Department of Philosophy, University of Bologna, and he is visiting CFI in June.

The lecture takes place 2 June from 14:00 to 15:00 at Nygaard, room 395. Everyone is welcome.