Giovanni Pala is a digital humanities scholar and economic historian with an interest in modern European history, the history of technology, and the role of culture and information in shaping the long-term developmental trajectory of societies.
Giovanni has a strong interest in the use of digital methods to extract and analyse a variety of sources, especially those that sit outside of the more established text-based approaches to historical analysis. This has led him to study and work collaboratively on materials as diverse as cartography and its accuracy, early modern ship hull design and its sailing performance, and cypher keys and political secrecy.
After studying for undergraduate and Master’s degrees in Economics at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna di Pisa, a national honours college for the social and applied sciences, Giovanni completed an MPhil in Economic and Social History (with distinction) at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. He completed his DPhil in History (History of Science and Medicine & Economic and Social History) at Magdalen College, Oxford. In 2019–2020, Giovanni was a William Alexander Fleet Fellow at Princeton University.
- Economic History
- History of Technology
- Computational History
- Digital Visual Methods in the Humanities
- Critical Digital Humanities
- Digital objects as translation: their digitization depth as a taxonomy for digital analogues
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 41 (2), 2026, 921-934 - The geography of financial integration: Regional disparities in Italian correspondent banking with London, 1920-1985 with M Molteni, and CR Schenk
Rivista di storia economica 42 (1), 2026, 47-79 - Tracing Changes in Shape of Historical Artefacts Across Time Using 3D Scans: A New Computational Approach with LS Costiner
Journal of Open Humanities Data 8, 2022, 14-14
