Speaker
Description
In this presentation, I introduce my personal experience in setting up an entire course dedicated to Computational Thinking and Programming for the Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge (DHDK) international second-cycle degree course at the University of Bologna.
The course is organised to present the essential and practical aspects of Informatics to students in Digital Humanities with no prior knowledge of them. In particular, the course introduces algorithms, data structures, and algorithmic techniques (i.e. the methods of computing), exemplified by using a particular programming language (i.e. Python) – by iterating on basic computational problems (find an item in a collection, sorting a list of items, solving a solitaire, etc.). The same computational problems are addressed with different techniques to show how it is possible to provide better solutions to them (e.g. more efficient strategies in terms of time/resources spent to address the problem) depending on some specific premises.
The main aim of the course is to provide enough tools to students to enable them to start their computationally-related career within a Digital Humanities (DH) curriculum. In addition to introducing the organisation of the course, in this presentation, I also introduce the main challenges, tools and services used to deliver the lectures and the material provided to learn the topics of the course.
