Il futuro degli studi umanistici al tempo dei Big Data.

[The future of Humanities in the era of Big Data]. This article proposes a critical enquire about the impact of the new wave of digital technologies on humanistic disciplines. Today humanists are called to accept the challenge of redefining their role in the age of globalization of culture. In the last twenty years, the widespread diffusion of the world wide web, search engines and social networks has definitively fostered a crisis of confidence about the idea of a purely instrumental use of the computer in order to facilitate the traditional humanistic research. More recently, the introduction of Big Data, remote reading, machine learning resources, products and tools have begun a process of radical transformation of the very practices of the Digital Humanities. In a more and more web-based digital environment, the humanistic research requires a high level of specialization, scientific expertise and technology infrastructures as well as massive funding.