Within the frame of the DHARMA project, between March and June 2020, Giulia Buriola and Csaba Kiss organized a seminar on Digital Humanities (DH) . Aimed at bachelor and master students from the Univeristy “L’Orientale,” the seminar introduced various theoretical issues of this young discipline, accompanied with some practical approaches and hands-on examples.
Due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the six sessions, initially planned to be “in person,” had to be moved online; in order to make the content easier to follow, the material was first presented through tutorials, pre-registered by Csaba and Giulia and shared with the students in advance. One hour and a half was then devoted to live sessions in which the participants could discuss the assignments and homeworks.
After the first introductory meeting, which dealt with more theoretical issues such as the defintion of DH, the data lifecycle, the concept of open science, of markup languages and so forth, our virtual meetings focused especially on XML and Python.
The students were able to train their XML encoing skills through the usage of editors such as Oxygen and Atom, and approached the XSLT process, being able to diplay, at the end, an html version of their in fieri editions. They learnt the basics of Python programming and managed to produce some statistical analysis on given material.
The experience was positive, as shown by a survey conducted among the students, and we hope there will be another chance of having such a stimluating seminar in a real classroom!