Digital Humanities, University of Bern Digital Humanities, University of Bern DH Lab
  • Lab
  • Programme
  • Assignment
  • Toolbox
  • Student Workflows
  • About
  • Intro to DH ↗
  1. Programme
  2. Session 3
  • Lab
  • Programme
    • Session 1
    • Session 2
    • Session 3
    • Session 4
    • Session 5
    • Session 6
    • Session 7
    • Session 8
    • Session 9
    • Session 10
    • Session 11
    • Session 12
    • Session 13
    • Session 14
  • Assignment
  • Toolbox
  • Student Workflows
    • How to add your workflow here
  • About

  • Introduction to DH (companion course)

On this page

  • In this session
  • Markdown
  • Obsidian
  • GitHub and Git
  • VSCodium
  • Exercise
  • Edit this page
  • Report an issue
  1. Programme
  2. Session 3

Session 3

Get to know useful stuff

Author
Affiliation

Tobias Hodel

Walter Benjamin Kolleg / Digital Humanities, University of Bern

Published

29 September 2026

Modified

2 September 2026

Hodel Taught by Tobias Hodel.

In this session

A working environment, assembled in one afternoon:

  • Markdown
  • Obsidian
  • GitHub
  • VSCodium

Markdown

  • Headings, emphasis, lists, links, images, code
  • Tables, footnotes, block quotes
  • Why plain text with light markup outlives every word processor
  • Flavours: GitHub Flavored Markdown, Pandoc, Quarto — and where they differ
  • Front matter: metadata at the top of the file
Note

These course pages are Markdown. Use the Edit this page link in the margin to see the source of any page here.

Obsidian

  • A note archive that is just a folder of Markdown files on your disk
  • Links between notes, and the graph they form
  • Tags, search, and daily notes
  • Plugins — including the Zotero integration
  • Why “your notes are plain text files you own” is the whole argument

GitHub and Git

  • Repository, commit, branch, remote — the concepts, then the commands
  • git clone, git add, git commit, git push, git pull
  • .gitignore, and what should never go into a repository
  • Issues and pull requests as a way of working, including with yourself
  • Merge conflicts: what they are and how to survive one

VSCodium

  • A code editor without the telemetry (why VSCodium and not VS Code)
  • Opening a folder, not a file — the mental shift
  • The integrated terminal, and Git integration
  • Extensions worth having: Markdown preview, XML, Python, Quarto
  • Multi-cursor editing, find-and-replace with regex, and the shortcuts that pay for themselves

Exercise

Create a repository, clone it, write a Markdown file in VSCodium, commit it, push it, and open an issue against your own repository. Then break something and recover it.

ImportantFinal-year meeting (I) — 16:00

Students in their final year report on their projects.

TipIn parallel in the Intro

Forms of data and metadata · GitHub introduction

Back to top
Session 2
Session 4
  • Edit this page
  • Report an issue