The ENCODE Project
Digital transformations in the cultural heritage sector have empowered the work of curation, made it easier for people to use cultural heritage for education, research, creation and recreation, and contributed to an open and knowledgeable society. Specialized disciplines in the humanities like papyrology, epigraphy, paleography, dealing with ancient written artefacts, embraced digital change developing tools for new forms of participatory research and collaborative publishing: these innovations require new competences and training both for graduate students and researchers in the rapidly evolving field of Digital Humanities and AI, in order to prepare new professionals contributing to preserving and giving access to the intercultural heritage of ancient texts spelled in multiple ancient languages and writing systems. ENCODE is grounded in the research-training experiences of other transnational initiatives, some of which already involve team members of the partners’ organizations: it primarily relies on the transnational EpiDoc community, and also considers experiences of other transnational initiatives such as Papyri.info, the Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri, Trismegistos, EAGLE, and SunoikisisDC. ENCODE targets are: graduate students in Ancient History, Archaeology, Classics, Cultural Heritage, Digital Humanities; stakeholders in the fields of cultural heritage curation, digital collections of artefacts and texts, and digital publishing; academics in the relevant disciplines.
Aims
Three objectives, touching societal, educational, institutional needs respectively, are set:
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to promote collaborative, participatory and intercultural digital approaches to ancient written heritage through new professional profiles and focused training of skilled graduates;
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to strengthen the crucial cooperation between higher education and cultural heritage institutions supplying materials for teaching and self-training to academics and providing stakeholders with support services;
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to meet learning needs of graduates in the field of highly specialized digital skills applied to the study of ancient writing media in old European, Asian and African languages through innovative teaching modules. From a methodological point of view, these modules are built around the following key principles:
a. they will be based on an internationally shared definition of learning outcomes;
b. they will use innovative pedagogies, enabling mutual learning among trainees and teachers, lifelong learning for both, and research-based learning;
c. they will enable modular integration into courses in various forms (including distance learning practice, blended, e-learning), according to training needs and contexts and they will bear future development and implementation according to evolution of technologies and training practices;
d. they will foster the inclusion of the training sets inside the university study curricula, increasing attractiveness through ICT-enriched learning and real-world-applications.
At the end of the project the modules will be made available online so that they may be used, implemented and customized according to different European contexts and teaching/learning needs.