Scholarly digital editions (SDEs) have been developed for years all over the world. According to Elena Pierazzo’s opinion (Pierazzo 2019: 209), considered as a “jewel in the crown of digital humanities”, they are nevertheless little known among Polish scholars. First large projects in Poland are still at an early stage of development. Only a few e-editions have already been published, such as CIDT&C Corpus of Ioannes Dantiscus’ Texts & Correspondence (Skolimowska / Turska 2010) or Jan Lechoń’s, Kazimierz Wierzyński’s and Mieczysław Grydzewski’s letters (Dorosz / Szleszyński 2022ab). Unfortunately, very few Polish scholars recognize SDEs as useful research tool (Bem 2020).
This situation is changing dynamically in recent years, perhaps due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which encouraged scientists and the government to look for alternative ways of conducting research, especially in cyberspace. In 2023, the Digital Humanities Lab Flagship Project was established at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow as part of a strategic project financed by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education. The main goal of our project is to aggregate the results of academic research in the field of digital humanities. Project team members are ready to share their own interdisciplinary experiences and best practices in creating SDEs. Some of them (including the Author of this proposal) are also working on a large digital edition of the collected works of Piotr Skarga, a famous Polish Jesuit preacher and priest who lived in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Teaching is an important aspect of work at university, as is conducting research (Hirsch 2012). Although lectures are a valuable source of knowledge, it is also important to give students and PhD candidates the opportunity to participate in projects that will give them a sense of agency, broaden their horizons, and have a positive impact on their professional careers (Mahony / Pierazzo 2012). The tools of digital humanities seem to perfectly match high expectations of the young generation, and at the same time respond to the needs of today’s innovative digital society. Unfortunately, the Global Innovation Index shows that the Polish innovation rate is decreasing year by year and is relatively low compared to other countries with similar income (WIPO 2023). To counteract these growing inequalities, we have decided to include digital humanities in the program of textual studies at the graduate level.
In my presentation, I would like to share my experiences and thoughts collected while conducting a practical course for students in the computer lab. The subject entitled ”Scholarly Digital Editing” was addressed mainly to students of the “Textual Scholarship” specialization, but it could also be attended by all students of Polish Philology. The classes took place once a week during the winter semester and were conducted for the first time. They were complemented by a theoretical course devoted to a wide range of issues related to digital humanities, such as its history and philosophical assumptions, as well as digital tools used in various disciplines: linguistics, literary studies, textual studies. In total, both courses lasted 60 teaching hours. This venture has been made possible thanks to the funding provided by the Jagiellonian University’s Flagship Project “Digital Humanities Lab”.
To achieve visible results, I decided to introduce project-based learning as the main teaching method. In a group of seven students, we worked from scratch on SDE of the 17th-century Polish translation of Historia del regno di Voxu del Giapone by Scipione Amati (Śliwski 1616). The students were already familiar with this text because the previous year they had worked on its transliteration, transcription, and commentary during the course on scholarly editing of ancient texts. Now, their task was to adapt the existing transcriptions to the requirements of the digital environment. As a team, they were supervised by the teacher who also worked with them at every stage of the project.
The biggest challenge for the teacher was to design a user-friendly workflow for humanists without programming skills that would be free (open source), accessible, and useful even in everyday, non-academic life. For this reason, I had to, for example, abandon the use of the Oxygen XML editor, which requires purchasing a license. Instead, I suggested to the students to use Visual Studio Code. Working on the edition provided our group an opportunity to become familiar with new tools and environments, such as Transkribus, GitHub, Docker, or TEI Publisher. Although the support of an IT-specialist would be valuable, students have realized that they can achieve a lot on their own, because almost every possible problem had already been extensively covered by the Internet user community. The classes proved to them that project-based learning is not just about solving a task; the process of reaching the results is equally important.
The subject I taught in the computer laboratory at Jagiellonian University was probably the first of its kind in Poland aimed at students in master’s degree programs. Currently, in some Polish academic cities, students can choose “Digital Humanities” as their field of study. However, it is most often considered an eclectic blend of journalism, philology, marketing, and library science with elements of computer science. While these studies are intended to help graduates find employment in advertising agencies, media corporations, cultural institutions, or even software houses as UX designers, they often have little in common with digital humanities understood as the digital paradigm of scholarly pursuits. Against this backdrop, the educational offering of Jagiellonian University significantly distinguishes itself, providing students with insight into issues explored by scholars from around the world.