Paper short abstract:

The proposed presentation intends to delve into the inaugural year of the Digital Anthropology course at the Department of Ethnology and Anthropology. It aims to explore central themes and potential new avenues in teaching digital anthropology, emphasizing student involvement as a key component.

Paper long abstract:

The field of digital anthropology is growing rapidly, becoming an integral part of university study programs, and increasingly captivating the attention of both scholars and prospective anthropology students as an appealing factor during enrollment. Considering that I am teaching the Digital Anthropology course for only the first year, and it is an elective course in the Ethnology and Anthropology program, my practical experience and knowledge regarding the subject and its scopes are currently limited. Despite this fact, encouraged by several independent student works and my mentorship throughout the course, I propose a presentation with the intention of reflecting on the topics encountered during the course.

Furthermore, the aim is to scrutinize strategies in learning and teaching digital anthropology framed within students' practical experiences working on two digital platforms. In other words, the observed experiences are based on dedicated work over the past three months and an attempt to understand how contents on digital platforms (our example includes Topoteka and Omeka) should be prepared and shaped for continuous and purposeful use by a broader audience (such as users interested in their own everyday history, family history topics, and/or researchers of visual forms, etc.).

The content on the digital platforms Topoteka and Omeka was prepared within the framework of two projects. After some time of platform usage, a post-project research was conducted on how the content is utilized and searched. Based on the results the aim of the practical course work was to reshape the content to be more user-friendly.