Students and scholars in the humanities generally rely on prefabricated tools to guide and instruct their research and are reluctant to engage with computers and technology through coding. At the moment, there are no broadly available academic programming courses aimed at humanities scholars. In the future, however, these coding skills will become increasingly important: to understand the various technologically mediated objects that we are studying, to the actual practice of our research, and to meet an ever-growing demand in the public and private sector for academics who can code
At the same time there is a development towards online academic education. Currently this is mainly in the form of MOOCs, which focus on massive numbers of students who can participate in these courses. There is a reasonable fear, however, that the lack of individual attention will lead to a decay of quality of education and scholarship. We believe, however, that a different, more creative use of online teaching and learning environments can actually help us educate both larger numbers of students as well as give more attention to the individual student. We call this approach "online first". It combines an interactive, dynamic teaching and learning environment with large QA sessions and smaller peer-feedback groups.
Programming also offers opportunities for new kinds of collaborative work. Larger research projects no longer need to be divided in several topics or objects, but people can divide labor through different tasks and skillsets. The various research techniques that can be explored programmatically include: parsing, visualization, mapping, interfacing, searching, computation, translation, and linking. This kind of large scale collaborative projects will make humanities more attractive for external funding.
The kind of humanities teaching that we propose will give the UvA Humanities Faculty a recognisable profile, that will not only lead to innovative forms of humanities research but also make our students more employable. The proposed course, with its corresponding learning and teaching environment, is the first step in achieving this vision.
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The kind of programme that we want to develop is unique to the humanities. The scholars that we will be educating are very different from those trained in traditional CS programmes. Our course will not focus on programming in itself, but on its concrete use and situated problems within the humanities. For that reason, we would like to use JavaScript as the central language, since this is rapidly becoming the lingua franca of the internet.
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The proposed course comes from concrete demand of several instructors (Rens Bod, Robin Boast, Jaap Kamps, Jan Hein Hoogstad, Marijn Koolen), who require their students to posses these basic skills to train them for more advanced research practices in second and third year bachelor courses and master programmes.
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Combining different programming skillsets allow for innovative, fundable collaborative research projects.
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The kind of online environments that we want to develop use the unique possibilities of digital media as an opportunity to think about innovative modes of education and research.
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These environments can combine the often contradictory demands of teaching large numbers of students and their need for individual feedback.
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It's our experience that many programmes have problems finding a satisfactory mode of teaching during the final four weeks in the 8-8-4 system. This course offers an intensive module that naturally fits in this structure.
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The "online first" environment allows students that come from other universities or programmes to follow the course independently. This allows them to participate in advance BA and MA courses.
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By offering this "online first" course as a pilot study, the faculty can safely and gradualy implement these new, cost-efficient modes of teaching.
- We want to collaborate with international academic and private partners on this project. We believe it is in the interest of all parties to have a recognizable profile for humanities scholars with coding skills that exceeds Amsterdam and meets the demands of the job market.
We propose to implement this course as an "on-line first" course, in which students study and work collaboratively in an on-line environment. In such an on-line environment, students can supervise each other and get rapid feedback.
The setup of this course can serve as a template for further/other courses to be developed in the future.
- knowledge of basic programming building blocks that carry over to almost all programming languages
- knowledge of web-based, client and server side services
- insight in technological aspects of humanities research
- skills in analysing humanities questions and material from a coding perspective
- experience in project-based collaborative humanities research
- 4 weeks intensive course, 6ECTS
- for the pilot, in block C in semester 2 (2013-2014)
- for the actual course, in block C in both semesters 1 and 2 (yearly from 2014-2015)
- a virtual environment with JavaScript assignments that provides immediate feedback
- on-line first course: students carry out assignments on-line and in small groups (2-5 students), with two or three QA lectures. This mode of teaching and learning encourages peer-feedback
- the advantage of on-line course is that students (and staff members) can do the course at any time. Only the QA lectures require students to register for the course in the C block.
- The assignments are aimed at giving the students a concrete idea of how these skills can integrated in their respective research practices
- Evaluation of assignments is done automatically on-line and students get instant feedback.