Coding the BeNeLux 2014

coding_the_benelux

Coding the Humanities

Humanities scholars have no ownerships over their tools, use pre-fabricated and often inappropriate tools. The aim of the Coding the humanities project is to build intermediate level tools to help humanities scholars build their own research tools.

We are developing a platform where scholars can learn programming and build small research tools that support individual steps in their research processes. 

With this platform we adopt techniques from the software development community, which has tackled several problems for collabaration, sharing of resources. Platforms like GitHub and Codepen support people in learning from others and to present and share their research. 


Programming and computers are great thinking tools. A programmatic approach to research forces you to make your arguments explicit, which makes it easier to critique them, but also to reuse, share and extend them.

We have developed an approach to learning to programme tailored to humanities scholars:
  - programming explained from the perspective of language instead from computation. Code is a language that is performative.
  - recent high-level programming languages are close enough to natural language to more easily adopt the basic programming concepts. For instance, the programming concept of variables relates to many aspects of humanities research, such as metaphors, definitions, ...
Our approach to programming (based on JavaScript) is web-oriented, which has many advantages:
  - can run in browser, no need to install complicated software
  - can therefore also be shared immediately with others
  - easy to make multimodal and interactive presentations, breaking away from the limitations of print
  - fully exploits the power of the web as a network for collaboration, sharing, discovery

Hurdles:
- how can we use the platform to introduce programming to interested scholars and students in way that is relevant to their own research?
- many scholars perceive a technical threshold, and fear they don't have the capacity to overcome this threshold. How can we help them realise this is unfounded and that the technical threshold is so low nowadays because of high-level programming language and supportive environments like GitHub, Codepen, etc?
- Tool building is research, but does not have that status yet. How can we change this?


Advantages of coding skills:
1. it becomes easier to communicate with technical partners about what you want and whether their deliverables live up to it.
2. you become more self-sufficient, being able to setup and execute your digital research.
3. you can create new tools and adust existing tools to your requirements.
4. you adopt new way of thinking about your research, including thinking about what tools and methods are appropriate for your research.