#dariahTeach Erasmus Project

Project Title

#dariahTeach

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2014

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Open and distance learning; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

The DARIAH-RC Strategic Partnership, which during the course of the project was renamed #dariahTeach, presents a unique new approach to curriculum development: an international consortium consisting of 9 institutions (HEIs and Research Institutes) from 8 European countries that joined forces to establish an open source, freely-available modular teaching platform with robust, peer reviewed content according to key benchmarking criteria in the rapidly expanding field of Digital Humanities.

While there may be many millions of digital objects available on the World Wide Web, the integration and exploitation of these objects in educational settings, using new research methodologies to pose and answer new research questions about them, is still embryonic. There are only a handful of HEIs offering degrees in these new methods, theories, and tools throughout the world, most commonly known as Digital Humanities (DH). Digital Humanities is a fast growing field that brings innovative and cutting-edge ICT methods to the humanities. It is interdisciplinary in nature, spanning not only the various fields of the humanities, but computer science, engineering, information studies, design, and the social sciences. Because of its digital underpinnings, traditional print textbooks, while adequate for teaching theory, are less suitable for teaching methods (including coding, markup, visualization, and modeling) in which there is a strong practice-based component.

Humanities students taught via traditional methods (some dating back as far as the 19th century) are left out of acquiring the skills and digital competencies necessary to participate in the knowledge economy of the 21st century. Digital Humanities bridges that gap by using cutting-edge ICT methods integrated into a humanities curriculum, providing students with transferable digital skills, and as such, provides a valuable route for students to increase digital competencies and skills, to improve their employment prospects, and to provide professional development opportunities for HEI educators.

The deliverables of this project have been made freely available online through a bespoke platform at https://teach.dariah.eu/. The portal utilised an extremely common teaching management system, Moodle, which ensures maximum reusability. Apart from that, the project communicates its goals, news and objectives through a project website (http://dariah.eu/teach/). Moreover, the project is associated with the Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH), ensuring its long-term sustainability. It has been designed in such a way that curricula can be localised both for language and tradition. This will allow learners across Europe to learn in their own language using examples from their own traditions, while providing a methodological template so that instructors can avoid wasteful duplication of effort.

In addition to creating the first-ever European-wide Digital Humanities teaching and training portal addressing key competencies and skills necessary for the use of computational methods in the study of the Arts and Humanities, #dariahTeach also highlights the role of cultural diversity in European education by offering examples of and encouraging further adaptation of training materials to specific linguistic/cultural contexts. In doing so, #dariahTeach dispels any notion that the use of ICT methods leads to abstract representations of culturally impoverished outputs. On the contrary, we have demonstrated how the use of digital technologies can help us identify, analyse and promote the unique contributions that individual languages and cultures have made to Europe and the world as a whole.

The impact of #dariahTeach is, however, not only symbolic. In very practical terms, this strategic partnership has enabled the meaningful, project-oriented and policy-relevant exchange of know-how between the participating institutions. Moreover, it is spreading that knowledge to other individuals and institutions through a series of MasterClasses in which new content can be developed for the portal. Hence, it is raising the profile of Digital Humanities in participating and in other countries by bringing an accessible and highly visible educational resource to our primary stakeholder audience: traditional humanities scholars, instructors and students who have not yet made the use of computational methods part of their intellectual portfolio. Moreover, since all our intellectual outputs are publicly and freely available through an open access portal, other potential stakeholders will be reached: the general public, life-long learners and cultural heritage professionals. By embedding the curriculum and training materials in the DARIAH-EU infrastructure, this strategic partnership has been able to guarantee the long-term sustainability of the project o

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 286765 Eur

Project Coordinator

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND MAYNOOTH & Country: IE

Project Partners

• ATHINA-EREVNITIKO KENTRO KAINOTOMIAS STIS TECHNOLOGIES TIS PLIROFOFORIAS, TON EPIKOLNONION KAI TIS GNOSIS
• UNIVERSITE DE LAUSANNE
• OESTERREICHISCHE AKADEMIE DER WISSENSCHAFTEN
• CENTAR ZA DIGITALNE HUMANISTICKE NAUKE
• AARHUS UNIVERSITET
• UNIVERSITE DU LUXEMBOURG
• ERASMUS UNIVERSITEIT ROTTERDAM