Handwritten culture through digital native eyes: student participation in the digital fragmentology project Textus invisibilis

The present paper addresses the issue of how interest-driven learning can enhance an attitude of student-generated inquiry in the learning process so to promote student participation in university research projects. The research question is how wonder as an epistemic emotion may sustain students’ interest-generated questioning, and how the latter may influence the design of a university research project. As a case-study, the paper describes a laboratory on palaeography which took place in Spring 2019 at an Italian State Archive within a University bachelor program in the context of a digital fragmentology project. To design the laboratory and establish qualitative analysis methods for its data, an interdisciplinary educational approach was designed that combines interest-driven learning, emotion theory, value theory, hermeneutics, and User Experience, on the background of Ernst Cassirer’s view of a human being as an animal symbolicum. In the laboratory, the students’ questions and hypotheses arising from their interaction with historical scripts and Medieval handwriting culture are helping redesign some aspects of the research project Textus invisibilis both on the level of the research design and of the team composition, as well as pointing to a novel relevance of state archives and historical libraries in higher education.