Workshop on the use of Heurist

In the framework of the project “The emerging landscape of digital work in the Humanities within the framework of the European DARIAH and CLARIN infrastructures”, the Academy of Athens DYAS team organised a workshop on the use of Heurist. Heurist is a data management system aimed at researchers in the humanities.
Speaker: Helen Katsiadakis, Historian, Researcher Emerita of the Academy of Athens.

The two workshops were held in Greek and consisted of:

• An introduction to the main features of Heurist
• A masterclass, i.e. practical application and exercise in creating databases for new users of the platform and
• Implementation of the application using participants’ own data.

They were addressed mainly, but not exclusively, to archaeologists, historians, philologists, social anthropologists, etc., researchers looking for an easy-to-use and flexible tool to organise their research data into a structured database. The goal of the two workshops was to familiarise users with the basic functions of Heurist. Participants covered a wide range of scientific domains: history, archaeology, philology, linguistics, architecture, history of art, theater studies. Some had little familiarity with the use of digital methods in research, others were more familiar with these methods, while some had previous knowledge of Heurist. Each of the two workshops consisted of two parts: In the first part, the speaker presented some basic principles governing databases and then demonstrated the comparative advantages of Heurist over other related tools and analyzed the main functionalities of the tool and how to use them. In the second part, the participants were invited, with the assistance of the speaker, to build a simple database and enrich it with their first data. As it emerged from a follow-up questionnaire, almost all participants intend to use their experience either in a future research project, or in current research or in the preparation of their doctoral thesis.