Maurizio Lana (Università del Piemonte Orientale, Italy) has been active in Digital Humanities research since 1989, with foci in the history of personal computing and quantitative authorship attribution. À propos the latter, he now collaborates with colleagues from mathematical physics to discover Gramscian articles among anonymous articles published by the newspaper with whom the young Gramsci collaborated. He is also active in digital libraries where he co-head the digilibLT project built around scientific quality of texts, TEI annotation, Open Access, and Creative Commons licenses. He also started to work on semantic tagging for literary texts, and submitted a major proposal for ERC Synergy European funding. Another is under development for FET Open funding.
Maurizio Lana is also a member of the steering committee of the new Italian digital humanities association AIUCD (Associazione per l’Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale). He hopes minimally to help keep the communication lines open between the two associations and maximally to help the two organizations to a form of productive cooperation. Because in these times of funding cuts to the humanities, be they digital or not, and of challenging their cultural and scientific importance, we must face the crisis also by innovating our ways of doing research through collaboration.