The University Library “Svetozar Marković” and the Society for Language Resources and Technologies – JeRTeh organized the first seminar, “Intro-duction to Digital Humanities: Workshops on the Implementation of Distant Reading in Research Practice”, and it was held in Tršić from December 4 to December 8, 2023.
 The seminar was conducted through collaboration between its authors and the Ministry of Science, Technological Developmentand Innovation of the Republic of Serbia.
 The seminar participants were undergraduate, master’s and doctoral students.
 The goal of the seminar was tointroduce students of philological disciplines and humanities to digital humanities methods, as well as to prepare and process texts for the applicationof distant reading techniques.
 The seminar included a lecture componentand a practical component, i.e., workshops.
On the first day of the seminar, two lectures were held, followed by the application of the theoretical segment in the afternoon.
 The first lecture, “Introduction to Digital Humanities”, was delivered by PhD Vasilije Milnović.
 At the beginning of his presentation, PhD Milnović reflected on the results of their previous projects, introduced the participants to the COST  Action CA16204:Distant Reading for European Literary History(2018–2022), andhighlighted the importance of digital humanities.
 He discussed the significance of developing language technologies, with a particular focus on the so-called “small languages” (e.g., Icelandic, Estonian, or Hebrew, where substantial investments are made in the field) and their potential applications lexicography, the teaching of Serbian language and literature, translation,and other areas.
The lecture by PhD professor Cvetana Krstev was dedicated to the SrpELTeC corpus.
 PhD professor Krstev introduced the participants to the process of creating this corpus and the criteria that had to be met for Serbian novels from the given period to become a part of the corpus (equal representation of male and female authors;
 balanced coverage of the selected period (1840–1920);
 variety in terms of length;
 inclusion of both well-knownand lesser-known works;
 diversity of authors).
 She discussed the challenges that occurred during the formation of the Serbian subcollection and theprocess of digitizing the first editions (or the oldest available ones).
 The digitization process includes the following steps:
 scanning, optical characterrecognition (OCR), correction, basic annotation, metadata entry and automatic advanced annotation.
The seminar participants were introduced to the process of how text correction and annotation are performed, and the way metadata is entered. On the first day of the workshop, they were given a text for correction following the annotation guidelines.
 In the following days, they entered metadata andworked on annotating linguistic entities in the text.
On the second day, PhD Aleksandra Trtovac, in her lecture “The University Library ‘Svetozar Marković’ and Distant Reading”, discussed the connection between librarianship and digital humanities, as well as their role inthe COST Action.
 PhD Trtovac dedicated her second lecture to the Transkribus projectand digitization using mobile phones.
 During the workshop that day, participants created accounts on Transkribus and were introduced to the DocScan app, which enables the uploading of handwritten works to generate text transcripts.
 A particularly useful segment was the introduction to advanced search in the COBISS system.
 In addition to the selective searching, the focus was also placed on the command searching.
 One of the valuable pieces of information shared was that the UNPAYWALL section contains open-access scientific articles. Furthermore, all names and surnames of a single author (useful when dealing with pseudonyms or whena female author’s surname has changed due to marriage) can be found in the CONOR.SR section.
On the third day, PhD professor Krstev introduced participants to the concept of named entities and the methods for annotating them in a text.
 PhD professor Ranka Stanković’s lecture was built upon the previous one, focusing on the processing of digital texts.
 Workshop participants workedon the automatic annotation of text segments with named entities (places,people, organizations, professions, etc.).
 Notes on more advanced types of annotation were also provided, followed by the review and evaluation ofautomatically annotated data.
On the same day, during the workshop, participants were introduced to Wikidata entries about Serbian novels and entered basic information about the text they received on the first day using the tools OpenRefine and Quick-Statements.
Additionally, participants were introduced to data querying using the SPARQL language.
The fourth day began with a lecture by PhD professor Duško Vitas, who discussed the process of creating a culinary corpus.
 PhD professor Ranka Stanković continued the topic by presenting the corpora available on the NOSKE platform of the JeRTeh society.
 Participants had the opportunity to learn the basics of the CQL language and how to query the srpELTeC corpus.
 The workshop focused on command searches, starting with simpler queries and progressing to more complex grammatical patterns and queries involving named entity tags.
On the final day of the seminar, participants attended the lecture “Initiative for the Development of Open NLP/NLU Resources and Tools forthe Serbian Language” by Slobodan Marković.
 The lecture highlighted the challenges of using artificial intelligence (AI) and the possibilities and issues related to processing the Serbian language with AI.
 The problem lies in the fact that models have not been fundamentally adapted, their applicationis not practical for business solutions, and their expressive capabilities are limited.
 The solution is to have as much training text as possible.
 Ideally, this data should be publicly available, under a permissive license, and cover both Serbian dialects.
 The goal of the initiative for open NLP resources is to have better search results and improved text comprehension.
This seminar provided comprehensive knowledge about the methods of digital humanities and the significance of this scientific field.
 It has allowed for better insights into future research, especially when it comes to annotating resources and working with textual corpora, which is where the greatest application of what was learned during the seminar lies.
 What should be emphasized as the most important outcome of these lectures and workshops is the opportunity to connect with colleagues and develop potential collaborations on future projects and research.
 This is precisely the main reason why, as a participant, I would highly recommend the seminar “Introduction to Digital Humanities: Workshops on the Implementation of Distant Readingin Research Practice”.
 This work was financed by the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia under Contract No. 451-03-136/2025-03/200174, concluded with the Institute for Serbian Language,SASA.
