Research groups and expertise are represented in the five ITSERR institutions as follows; below you’ll find a table with the main research topics of the ITSERR Work Packages (WP):
Within the ISTI-CNR “Alessandro Faedo” you can find several research groups and a high expertise in different fieldworks. Surely, the Research Group of the Artificial Intelligence for Media and Humanities (AIMH) is playing a pivotal role in developing and improving Religious Studies.
ISTI-CNR is contributing to the development of a great number of the ITSERR WPs, for this reason here you can enjoy the expertise of research groups working on: WP3-T-Res, WP4-DamSym; WP5-Digital Maktaba; WP7-REVER; WP8-UbiQuity. In fact, the Research Group of the Artificial Intelligence for Media and Humanities (AIMH) is playing a pivotal role in developing and improving Religious Studies. Its laboratory has the mission to investigate and advance the state of the art in the Artificial Intelligence field, specifically addressing applications of digital media and digital humanities, and taking also into account issues related to scalability. The research lines in AI and textual data and AI and digital humanities are strongly contributing to the developing of ITSERR WPs. They contribute on textual data analysis, understanding, and classification, as the representation learning for text classification, transfer learning for cross-lingual and cross-domain text classification, sentiment classification, sequence learning for information extraction, text quantification, transductive text classification. Moreover, the laboratory works on AI-based solutions to represent, access, archive, and manage tangible and intangible cultural heritage data wo This includes solutions based on ontologies, with a special focus on narratives, and solutions based on multimedia content analysis, recognition, and retrieval.
At UniMORE you can enjoy the expertise of research groups working on the following ITSERR WPs: WP4-DamSym; WP5-Digital Maktaba; WP6-YASMINE and WP7-REVER. Moreover, UniMORE is involved in Religious Studies not only through the ITSERR project and its development within different fieldworks, such as the IT technologies in the development of software and tools for the improvement of the domain of the Religious Studies, but also for its didactic and courses of studies, as below:
Within the Department of Asian, African and Mediterranean Studies, you can enjoy the expertise of the team of the ITSERR WP10 – ReTINA, which aims to provide a component dedicated to the production and use of digital archives that collect complex, rare and/or endangered religious texts written in various media (stone, papyrus, etc.) from the Nile Valley and beyond.
At UniPa you can enjoy the expertise of research groups working on: WP3-T-Res, WP4-DamSym; WP5-Digital Maktaba; WP6-YASMINE; WP7-REVER; WP8-UbiQuity. However, UniPa is highly involved in Religious Studies not only through the ITSERR project and its development within different fieldworks, but also through its didactic and courses of studies with programmes and calendars of activities which ensure the organization of workshops and conferences with important scholars on Religious Studies.
Within the Department of Historical Studies, several research groups and a high expertise in different specific fieldworks. Here the ITSERR WP9-TAURUS team is developing a software toolkit for 3D visualisation which brings a high improvement in the fruition of historical heritage artefacts and materials. The dataset of the team has been created by combining the use of portable light-scanners (stereo and microscanners) on the collection of cuneiform tablets with religious content from the Eastern Collections of the Royal Museums of Turin, one of the most compete and ancient of Italy. Moreover, the team, by post-processing the high-resolution images, reveal for the first time some surprising details to discover new aspects of the life of the objects – about their production, storage, and their own authors.
| ITSERR Work Package (WP) | Main Topics | Outcomes |
| WP3-T-Res | Creation of critical editions of primary sources and a categorization of printed religious normative sources | Development of two open-source softwares (CRITERION and GNORM) for the creation of critical editions and the automatic analysis and categorization of printed religious normative sources through data mining techniques and 3D visualization |
| WP4-DamSym
|
Translations of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed as a case study | Development of softwares and algorithms for texts to improve understanding techniques to the investigation of semantic textual issues, using the translations of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed as a case study |
| WP5-Digital Maktaba | Cultural heritage data in non Latin Languages | Creation of a digital cataloguing system for libraries specialized in religious studies that need to manage cultural heritage data in non-Latin alphabets, starting with the Arabic alphabet |
| WP6-YASMINE | Two case studies: “Sanctuaria,” which focuses on shrines and their connections, and “Plorabunt,” a database of individuals killed in places of worship since 1982 | A tool – called YASMINE – using artificial intelligence to extract and analyze data and knowledge from various sources, including the web for use in religious studies research |
| WP7-REVER | Archival documents connected to Regesta (scholarly summaries) and translations of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed as a case study ecclesiastical sources | Development of an expert-augmented machine learning algorithms that can reconnect archival documents to their regesta |
| WP8-UbiQuity | References to the Bible and the Qur’an in ancient commentaries | Development of a machine learning search engine for identifying references to the Bible and the Qur’an in ancient commentaries and designed to search through two large corpora: Christian and Islamic commentaries |