Laptops in the Auditorium: Facing Educational Challenges in Classics by Teaching Digital Tools

Abstract

Higher education in the Arts and Humanities nowadays faces global challenges. By its very nature, Classics is among the disciplines which experience the harshest consequences of the large economic and cultural shifts we are witnessing. In the last decades, the students graduating from the BA curriculum of the Department of Classics to the University of Sofia have decreased in number, their profiles, motivation and interests have gone through various changes, their devotion to reclusive, slow and thorough acquisition of knowledge – so characteristic of the typical figure of the classicist a century ago – has significantly diminished. On the other hand, new technologies not only became ubiquitous in the lives of students and teachers alike but also gave rise to the multidisciplinary field of Digital Humanities, and Digital Classics in particular. Several such initiatives have been developing at the Department of Classics to the University of Sofia and, as of late, have also been introduced to the BA curriculum in Classics. The paper will discuss how getting involved in activities such as encoding ancient Greek inscriptions or working on parallel text alignment can serve as a quick and efficient introduction to more complex research problems and approaches in advanced fields like epigraphy. The general request of policy-makers and public alike for practically oriented higher education yielding quick and relevant results often leads to shallower educational results of lesser quality. Solving research issues through working on ancient sources with digital tools can be a way of acquiring deeper knowledge of the subject matter of Classics more quickly. Examples from different courses and project activities will be examined in order to observe how digitally-aided research works in practice.