The competency development course Digital Literacy at the faculty of Arts, Aarhus University closed with a seminar on March 27, 2019. The course began in February 2018 and has involved seminars on different topics within the field of Digital Humanities as well as practical courses in Nvivo, statistics and Geographical Information Systems.

The closing seminar was well attended by representatives from the University of Copenhagen, Aalborg University, The Royal Danish Library, IT-Vest and Cudim besides course participants and support staff from Aarhus University.

Vice-dean of education at Arts Niels Overgaard Lehmann opened the seminar, outlining the accomplishments of the course, before head of Digital Arts Initiative and coordinator of Digital Literacy, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, described the many elements of the course and how they relate to the needs in humanities’ engagement with new collections of data.

The seminar marked a closing but at the same time, a great amount of attention was centered towards the future. A new Center for Computational Humanities Aarhus, lead by Kristoffer Nielbo, is being opened at Aarhus University. The aim of the new center is to provide an adaptive research and development unit, that supports and intervenes in humanities research through collaborative development and at the same time ensure that scientific developers and research software engineers have a career path within the organization.

The new center sparked a debate about support structure while the integration of digital methods in teaching also was discussed during the day. Besides the debates, several presentations were held by course participants of Digital Literacy on very different topics: an analysis of Danish sermons, automated analysis of student texts, self-regulated learning, Anthropomorphism, Twitter-analysis, analysis of audio and radio, the concept of Kvinde and Newspapers.

The competency development course was the first of its kind, but it’s very likely that a second round of the course will run – either at Aarhus University or as a national cooperated course.