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coding_the_benelux.md

Coding the Humanities

Jan Hein Hoogstad - University of Amsterdam Marijn Koolen - University of Amsterdam

Humanities scholars often use pre-fabricated and often inappropriate tools.The aim of the Coding the humanities project is to help humanities scholars gain ownership of research tools by building their own.

For this project, we are currently 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.

In this presentation we want to discuss the challenges that we want to tackle in this project:

  • How can we use the platform to introduce programming to interested scholars and students in a 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 languages and supportive environments like GitHub, Codepen, etc?
  • Tool building is research, but in the humanities it does not have that status yet. How can we change this?

=== We have developed an approach to learning to programme tailored to humanities scholars and explain programming from the perspective of language instead from computation. Recent high-level programming languages are close enough to natural languages so that the basic programming concepts are relatively easy to comprehend.

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

===

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