Facing the challenges of the current pandemic, Antonio Gerace (Fscire) found an alternative to transferring knowledge he gained during a previous ReIReS training opportunity to his colleagues: he organized an online training session in Digital Humanities.

Why Train Others?

Everyone who is active in teaching  will probably recognize this fact: teaching is a great way of learning. This has to do with the fact that you have to go through the learning process yourself and organize what you know in such a way for others that they are able to understand what you are talking about, and – in the case of a training – that they also will get an opportunity  to practice what they have acquired.

This is one of the reasons that we ask people who attend a ReIReS training session to train others in the same topic – except that sharing knowledge will enlarge the impact of the original training.

Antonio Gerace in his element while teaching

How to Train Others?

First, Antonio Gerace organized an online session via Zoom. 20 participants in total joined the online session, which is a very good rate of participation! Antonio introduced his colleagues to the world of Digital Humanities and Religious Sciences, CSS language, IRS and IR applications, computing theories etc., and also showed them some practical examples.

Antonio had this to say about his training: “The training session on ‘Digital Humanities and Religious Sciences’ was more digital than I have expected when I planned it, but the close (and virtual) collaboration with my colleagues made that session very fruitful. In effect, the course I followed myself was very inspiring thanks to the quality of the trainers, and their clear teachings made my work easier! In addition to the practical issues (creation of a webpage, digital transcription of manuscripts, etc.) what I – and ‘we’ I think – have really learned is the necessity for a humanist not only to work with digital tools, but also to learn the know-how to build them, in order to efficiently adapt informatics to the specificities of human (and religious) science”.

Experiences

Alessia Passarelli attended the online training. Read here her experiences:

“Last week I had the opportunity to attend a training session on “Digital Humanities and Religious Sciences”. Due to the pandemic, we had to take the course online but, actually, what could have seemed an obstacle, became an asset: its content and its implications for humanities in general and religious science in particular have never been more relevant! We have not only discussed the importance of digital humanities but we have developed the initial “know how” on how to apply the digital tools to our own work. In difficult times, where libraries and archives have been closed, the possibility to access books and archives online, to consult digital transcriptions of manuscripts – for instance – and share content of our own research, allows researchers to continue to work and the humanities and religious studies to be more accessible.”