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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.

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var data = { 

Students : [

{ name : "Jade", StudentNumber: "10350764" },

{ name : "Anouk", StudentNumber: "0000000" },

]

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stepsData = [
  title: "Question"
  description: "Answering these question helps you to define the goal and focus of your project."
  stepNumber: 0
  answerGroups: [
    id: 0
    question: "What is the title of your project?"
    type: "short"
  ,
    id: 1

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Humanities Dimension of our Course

Examples

Bosch project

• imaging
• translation
• mapping

New York Times Guantanamo project

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Diagnosis

Students and scholars in the humanities generally rely on prefabricated tools to guide and instruct their learning and research. They are reluctant to engage with computers and technology through coding. This remains a major distinction between the humanities and the sciences. The sciences design, create and maintain their own relevant digital research enviornments and tools, while the humanities make do with prefabricated, and often inappropriate, tools.

At the moment, there are no broadly available academic programming courses aimed at humanities scholars. For various reasons, however, coding skills are needed now more than ever, and even more so in the future:

1. Knowledge of programming helps students and researchers to understand the various technologically mediated objects that they are studying.

2. Developing custom tools, rather than using ready-made ones, can improve the actual practice of humanities research as well as (the quantity and quality) of its output.

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Coding the Humanities

Vision

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