From collaborative transcription to interdisciplinary education: the postcards of the Great War case

The authors intend to present an educational experimentation that took place in the first semester of the academic year 2018-2019 at the degree course in Informatica Umanistica at the University of Pisa. The experimentation involved the courses of Digital Public History, Digital Text Encoding as well as Digital Philology, and concerned the digitization of a corpus of postcards from the period of the First World War. The postcards, owned by the ethnographic museum of La Spezia “G. Podenzana” and in collaboration with it, have been historically contextualized, digitized, placed on a platform and distributed to the students in order to be recorded, transcribed and encoded with the following purposes:  make students participate in a real Digital Public History project;  consider the problems of how to record, transcribe, share and encode a corpus of historical postcards;  evaluate how to combine more educational activities into a wider project of crowdsourcing;  test a collaborative platform and some encoding tools;  test methods and timing to allow the collaboration between individual courses within a university degree course in DH. The authors aim to highlight the main problems encountered and the added values of the integration of courses in teaching Digital Humanities.