The ALCIDE platform is here

News articles, essays, political and institutional speeches around which the political activity of Alcide De Gasperi developed are now freely available online on ALCIDE, the digital platform created by the Italian-German Historical Institute and the Digital Humanities group (ICT Center) at Trento-based Fondazione Bruno Kessler.

A total of 2,762 documents that can be analyzed in an innovative way thanks to the collaboration of FBK historians and computer scientists specializing in the humanities who worked on the digitalization of the De Gasperi’s writings and political speeches and the construction of an original software to combine speech analysis tools with data visualization models.

The platform allows to organize a considerable amount of data and is designed both for expert users and for the general public. In fact, users can use ALCIDE for analytical research or be navigated through the huge number of documents relying on simplified contents. It is possible to carry out searches by names, headwords, keywords, places, co-occurrences and networks of people, freely choosing chronology and reference text types.

With few clicks, it will be possible to discover which themes mark De Gasperi’s agenda, how he changes and adapts his political goals, how the style of his political communication changes over time and in the different discursive areas, which are the figures of the political and cultural world with which he is most closely involved in the course of his publication activity.

“In the era of full sharing of data and information”, FBK-ISIG researcher Maurizio Cau points out, “the humanities are increasingly opening up to open use models, thanks also to the development of Digital Humanities and the potential of artificial intelligence. This is confirmed by the digital edition of the writings of Alcide De Gasperi, which represents an occasion of great importance for the study of the twentieth-century political discourse. It is the first time, in fact, that the entire corpus of a central representative of the cultural and political history of twentieth-century Italy is made available fully and freely online”.

The A.L.C.I.D.E. project (Analysis of Language and Content in a Digital Environment) which gave rise to the platform and which was created thanks to the collaboration of the publisher Il Mulino and the support of the CARIPLO and CARITRO Foundations, will be presented during the seminar scheduled for Thursday. June 27 at 11.00 am at the FBK offices on Via S. Croce in Trento.