Enabling digital humanities research skills through a new Romanian DH centre: the WUT case

This contribution aims to offer an overview of a newly founded digital humanities centre in Romania, CODHUS ( Centre for Corpus Related Digital Approaches to Humanities), which promotes the multidisciplinary use of digital methods related to corpus linguistics (https://codhus.projects.uvt.ro/?lang=en). Since Fall 2019, the centre develops both research studies, course implementation and testing of digital methods, tools for the humanities disciplines, useful for the academic staff, and performs workshops and training for students, in order to build a larger research community that is able to gain cross-disciplinary skills (see Chitez / Rogobete 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic challenged teachers and researchers to "migrate to online platforms" (Adedoyin / Soykan 2020: 1), but integrating new strategies and adapting the educational environment is always demanding. Thus, CODHUS brings a series of good practice examples (see Chitez et al. 2020: 553-554), developed in order to enable digital humanities pedagogies and bring this field closer to the academic curricula within West University of Timișoara (WUT). By participating at practice stages and workshops developed by CODHUS, students from our Faculty (Letters, History and Theology) can thoroughly embrace the digital transformation that is desired at the institutional level. They become digital humanists "capable of ‘toggling’ between views of the data, zooming in and out, searching for large scale patterns and the focusing in on fine-grained analysis" (Burdick et al. 2012: 39).

The workshop from first semester is designed to introduce students to digital instruments useful for linguistic studies and discourse analysis, and in December 2020 focused on several practical applications: students briefly analysed two distinct corpora that brought into attention the way in which language use was transformed during the pandemic. More specifically, they identified key terms and N-grams frequently used in the recent media, extracting "pandemic words" from media articles related to health published in March-November 2020 (see https://codhus.projects.uvt.ro/news/december-2020-digitt-series-workshops/?lang=en). The second analysed corpus consisted of linguistics articles published in the same period, in which several new terms were explained. In this context, students had to identify the author’s sources of clarification and illustration (such as dictionaries, web resources etc.). Overall, this workshop challenges very up-to-date corpora and is conceived to present students features of a language that is permanently evolving.  

In the second semester, the focus turns to literary studies and the corpora delivered to students are mainly collections of poetry (mainly Romanian authors). During this workshop, participants analyse metaphorical and non-metaphorical contexts of specific terms, observe the evolution of an author’s stylistics and acquire a quantitative perspective on poetry, that enlightens the hermeneutical one (see activity from 2020 here: https://codhus.projects.uvt.ro/news/april-2020-digitt-series-workshops-what-happens-to-literary-studies-when-we-stayhome-at-first-year-specializations-romanian-language-and-literature-aa/?lang=en; to be further developed in 2021). Whether discussing concordances, N-Grams, most frequently used terms, participants considered the activity had a "significant learning effect" (Wahid 2011: 106). Both of the workshops closed with a questionnaire that evaluated students’ satisfaction with the activity and their suggestions addressed to the academic staff.

Moreover, because the entire community is interested in applied topics, not only in theoretical ones, the practice stages conducted by CODHUS have proven to be fructuos for students, since 70% of the participants in 2019-2020 have chosen the centre also in 2020-2021 or have been part-time hired within research projects developed by members of the faculty. CODHUS proves to be an institution that enables students to develop their digital skills not only in the educational context, but also in the field of research. Furthermore, the centre emphasizes the "relationship between the interpretative strategies that humanists employ and the tools that facilitate exploration" of texts and discourses "based on those interpretative strategies" (Schreibman et al. 2004: xxv).