How can digital tools and open, connected databases contribute to the teaching of history at university level, and how can these tools be integrated into the curriculum? These are the questions that higher education teachers and digital
humanities specialists will address in this workshop.
On the one hand, information analysis skills are the historian's most important skills. They are also the ones that are most valued in the professional field. On the other, this information and data management is based on knowledge of new fields.
To what extent is it possible to equip new students with critical knowledge of information systems, and how can these skills be combined with historical analysis and the dissemination of knowledge? The issue of digital tools raises questions for history curricula, and this workshop will help teachers and specialists in the digital humanities to exchange ideas and understand the needs in the training of historians.
This workshop will consit of a panel discussion and two round tables.
In the panels, we will look back on our experiences. The applicant is part of the Swissuniversities-granted project LOD4HSS led by Professor Tobias Hodel (UNIBE) and responsible for the teaching aspect. With the help of collaborators working on the Geovistory platform, a digital ecosystem specifically designed for the historical sciences, he gave a Master seminar in which students used this new database to classify objects from Fribourg's museums. Other teaching experiences dealing with digital humanities will be presented in the first panel.
Then, we will be discussing the main challenges encountered during these courses, in particular the difficulty of introducing both a historical topic and digital tools during a semester-long course. Early preparation of the platform seems to be
an interesting avenue, but we'll discuss the forms that preparations need to take.
Secondly, digital history requires collaboration between historians and experts in the digital humanities, to teach the basics of programming, understand the contributions of digital tools (databases, ontologies, information systems) and obtain innovative results for research. This section will focus on the question of where to draw the line between technical and content-based teaching, so that students can benefit from both in their studies.