This article explores the usage of testimonies in the Visual History Archive of the University of Southern California's Shoah Foundation to create learner-centred activities on the history of the Holocaust targeted at Portuguese students. We describe the project ‘Remembering the Past, Learning for the Future: Research-Based Digital Learning from Testimonies of Survivors and Rescuers of the Holocaust’, housed at the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (ULICES). Via the international partnership (USC Shoah Foundation, Zachor Foundation, and the University of Eötvös Loránd), the ULICES team developed materials using testimony from witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust through digital tools with an innovative pedagogical methodology. We introduce the constructivist theory of learning, stressing the powerful impact of survival testimonies on raising student awareness and developing a wide range of skills. We also describe the methodological process that underlay this project, namely the creation of the six learning activities for the IWitness educational platform and the IWalk visits, focusing on the translation tasks of the written materials and the audiovisual translation of the videos. We also report on how students received the activities by retrieving information from teachers’ and students’ reports, and an onsite experience with two groups of students.

This article presents the courses on digital humanities (DH) offered by the Seminar für Semitistik und Arabistik at Freie Universität Berlin in three semesters in the period 2021–2023. The article provides an overview of the organizational background, the rationale for the selected teaching format, and the syllabus developed. In the discussion section, we present our observations based on the teaching activities and feedback from the course participants. The article aims to discuss methods of teaching DH at the university level as well as to document a teaching format that links together teaching, training and research.

As the number of digital archives increases – both traditional archives that have been digitized and ‘born digital’ collections – so, too, grows the number of tools and methodologies through which they can be better understood. This article explores how archives can be ‘mapped’ digitally, using network analysis to examine epistolary networks built on the State Papers archives of England. It will outline some of the core contributors to the archives, while also pointing to smaller actors and collections, whose place in the epistolary network and the archives are best revealed when viewed at scale within this ‘mapping’ process. This article demonstrates that – as with any other historical dataset – understanding the archives and the ways in which they are constructed is vital to further quantitative analysis, and how this is turn may bolster digital historical narratives. As such, this article not only demonstrates the outcomes of adopting digital methodologies, and how they may shape ongoing historical research and narratives, but also illustrates the ways in which the adoption of these quantitative measures allows for a critical reconsideration of historical sources, their origins and the ways in which they can be used.

Computer art has recently become a vital part of the artistic process of creating digital versions of illustrations. Digital painting is an example. It has become a new phenomenon in Chinese art, transforming technique, aesthetics and culture. Thus, this study determines the impact of digital tools on the digital painting skills of students with different painting levels. The study involved 90 students from the Zhengzhou Preschool Education College in China. The study used a quasi-experimental design with a single-group pre-test/post-test design. The research findings indicated that there were improvements in painting skills for the groups with poor and medium achievements. The considered painting skills included composition, colour theory, interpretation and creativity. The resulting data validate the positive impact of digital tools on learning and creating paintings. The research described in this article is valuable for creating and implementing innovative courses in digital painting. Future studies should focus on the design and development of computer-aided painting courses and their impact on art students.

This article evaluates the integration of digital editions, computational text analysis and digital scholarly editing in the context of an introductory undergraduate course on Italian literature and digital humanities taught at a US university. It offers specific examples of employing the apparatus of several digital platforms dedicated to the study of foundational authors in the Italian literary tradition (Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio and Leopardi), and of gaining familiarity with a suite of digital tools for text analysis and editing, namely Voyant Tools, Recogito, Oxygen, Gephi, Transkribus Lite and OpenRefine. The discussion of digital project interfaces examines the student user experience of different design approaches, while the illustrations of tool exercises explore how these could support the close attention to a text and facilitate the navigation between its micro and macro frameworks of interpretation. The article furthermore suggests that digital text analysis could reinforce student appreciation of the signifying value of textual form and genre, and that the pedagogical method of digital text editing creates opportunities for situated learning. In conclusion, it argues that the academic work of students at the undergraduate level could be harnessed by the scaffolded methods of faculty-led digital research projects and contribute to the creation of public knowledge.

This geographical information systems (GIS) reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (1985) provides a literary geography analysis that plots latitude and longitude coordinates in conjunction with Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s chronotopes of the Road, the Rabelaisian, the Petty-Bourgeois Provincial Town, the Threshold and the political cartography of the United States–Mexico border established by the 1849 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to map the emergence of an American Imperial chronotope. Blood Meridian is a fictionalized account of historical events carried out by the Glanton Gang, a band of mercenaries contracted by Governor Trias in 1849 to counter the threat of Apache raids in Chihuahua province, Mexico. Viewed through the lenses of a GIS/MAXQDA platform, Blood Meridian comes into focus as ‘cartographical novel’ illuminating its literary geography as a melange, spun from allusions to and spatial remediations of Classical, medieval and Indigenous mythologies. The GIS/MAXQDA platform frames Blood Meridian as deep chronotopic map that, in tracing the spiralling lifepath of its protagonist, the ‘Kid’, across the terra damnata of the American Southwest and northern Mexico, creates an analogy and spatial metaphor for the violent geographical teleology of US nineteenth-century westward expansion which unfolded between the 1830s and 1880s.