The Sunoikisis Digital Classics programme (SunoikisisDC), a collaborative endeavor involving faculty from six continents, produces reusable materials that many participants use in some way in their own teaching. It was founded in 2015 by Monica Berti in Leipzig, as an offshoot of the Sunoikisis programme hosted by the Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies. It is now co-chaired by Monica Berti in Leipzig and Gabriel Bodard in London, with co-organizers all around the world.
The core of the syllabus is the online session, delivered by one or more presenters via live YouTube video, with slides, demos, discussion panels and the potential for student interaction via chat. Sessions are accompanied by (open access) reading lists, resources and exercises for students to gain hands-on experience in tools, methods and skills discussed. Many faculty who use SunoikisisDC in their teaching have students follow the online sessions and attempt practical exercises, and then attend a seminar or tutorial in person, which allows collaboration, discussion, technical support and feedback on both formative and assessed work. This year, of course, some of this in-person engagement is likely to be moved online as well.
SunoikisisDC 2020-2021 Wiki
There are currently three semesters of SunoikisisDC sessions, organised more or less independently, and with a greater or lesser degree of overlap with each other (and indeed with sessions from previous years), depending on the organizers. There are also individual sessions and mini-semesters, held at irregular times and hosted on the same YouTube channel. In fall of 2020 the syllabus is Digital Classics (in parallel with the ICS02 master module in London), chaired by Gabriel Bodard, with co-chairs Monica Berti, Irene Vagionakis (Bologna) and Polina Yordanova (Helsinki) each responsible for a portion of the programme, on the themes of collaboration, text encoding, and computational linguistics, respectively. The spring 2021 syllabus will focus on Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage (alongside London module ICS03), and is led again by Bodard with co-chairs Valeria Vitale (British Library), Andrea Wallace (Exeter) and Alicia Walsh (Recollection Heritage). The summer 2021 programme, Digital Classics (as part of the MSc of Digital Humanities in Leipzig), is led by Monica Berti.
The full programme of the fall Digital Classics semester is at the SunoikisisDC GitHub Wiki, including session pages, YouTube links, reading lists, exercises, and summaries of all sessions. The calendar is as follows (sessions are on Thursdays at 17:00–18:15 German time unless indicated otherwise):
- Thu, Oct 8, 2020: Open Source software, commandline and Git (Monica Berti, Gabriel Bodard & Irene Vagionakis) [session page] [YouTube]
- Thu, Oct 15, 2020: Introduction to Markup (Jonathan Blaney, Charlotte Tupman, Irene Vagionakis) [session page] [YouTube]
- Monday, Oct 19, 2020: EpiDoc XML (Gabriel Bodard, Alessio Sopracasa, Irene Vagionakis) [session page] [YouTube]
- Thu, Oct 29, 2020: Introduction to Computational Linguistics (Alek Keersmaekers, Marton Ribary, Thea Sommerschield) [session page] [YouTube]
- Thu, Nov 5, 2020: Web Annotation (Monica Berti, Valeria Vitale) [session page] [YouTube]
- Thu, Nov 12, 2020: Research with Wikimedia Commons (Monica Berti, Gabriel Bodard, Richard Nevell) [session page] [YouTube]
- Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 16:30–17:45: Using Treebanks (Francesca Dell’Oro, Vanessa Gorman, Marja Vierros, Polina Yordanova) [session page] [YouTube]
- Thu, Nov 26, 2020: Translation Technologies (Franziska Naether, Chiara Palladino) [session page] [YouTube]
- Thu, Dec 3, 2020: Visualisation (Aurélien Berra, Gabriel Bodard, Naomi Wells) [session page] [YouTube]
All sessions are freely available online, and everyone, student or not, is welcome to watch, leave comments in the live chat if you are with us live, and attempt the exercises. Contents of the SunoikisisDC Programme remain available on GitHub and YouTube indefinitely, and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. If you are interested in using any of the SunoikisisDC materials in your own teaching and would like to discuss any aspect of the programme, please do get in touch with any of us.
Monica Berti, Gabriel Bodard, and Valeria Vitale
