Since 2016, members of the Research Infrastructure of Institute of the Contemporary History have been offering practical training to interested history, and library and information science students. In 2024, this activity, in collaboration with the Department of History at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, evolved into an initiative to establish a structured postgraduate training course. The course combines in-depth thematic lectures with practical training aimed at improving students’ research skills, with a focus on the use of digital methods.
The practical training begins with an introductory module, where students are introduced to the functioning of the national research infrastructure and the Institute’s role within it. In this module, students learn about the basic guidelines and procedures used in the development of the portal Slovenian History – Sistory and beyond (copyright, material valorisation, digitisation processes, metadata management).
The second module focuses on introducing the basics of digital humanities. Participants are given an overview of the field, including key definitions, methods, and various outputs (digital editions, databases, tools, and corpora). The activities focus on acquiring knowledge related to raw content and structured corpora, along with an introduction to the basics of XML and TEI encoding.
In the last module of the practical literacy course, students:
- work on individual TEI XML files that contain transcription errors and correct them within the TEI framework;
- get to know the NoSketch Engine tool, which they use to track search processes and explore linguistic data.
A key component of the course is the individual research project. In the final and most time-consuming phase, students use the skills they have acquired to write seminar papers. For their research seminar, students can choose from five different modules, which are expected to change from year to year.
Each student works with two mentors—one with expertise in historical research methodology and another with knowledge of digital techniques. This approach ensures a comprehensive integration of theory and methodology and prepares students to incorporate digital methods into historical research.