Digital Representation of City Cultural History: Feedback on the Twenty-year Long Interdisciplinary Experiment

Abstract

The paper studies how the interaction between the tools offered by information technologies and the definition of our fields of studies in the humanities has evolved over the years, tracing the history of the research and teaching programme Georgian Cities —the authoring of a multidisciplinary website on 18th-century British cities. The primary purpose of the first phase —a CD-ROM started in the mid 1990s and published in 2000— was to show the multidisciplinary potential of the electronic medium, allowing the viewer to relate separate approaches to urban studies, such as cartography, architectural history, social history, cultural history. With the next phase, moving the programme on to the web, made possible by the technical evolution of the early 21st century and completed in 2014, the project allowed for experiments in digital tools; it is accompanied by a course on a learning management system experimenting the “learning by doing” approach. The progression from “digital resources for the humanities” of the 1990s to the closer integration of “digital humanities” of the 2010s was thus followed.