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. 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. However, coding skills are needed more now than ever, and even more so in the future:
- They help students and researchers to understand the various technologically mediated objects that they are studying.
- 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.
- There is an ever-growing demand in the public and private sector for academics who can read and write 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 feedback and direct interaction in those courses 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 Q&A 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 into several topics or objects, but people can divide labor through different tasks and skill sets, using tools developed by humanities scholars for humanities scholarship. 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 the humanities more attractive for external funding.
The kind of humanities teaching that we propose will give the UvA Humanities Faculty a unique profile, which will not only lead to innovative forms of humanities research but also make our students more employable. It will also provide a test-bed for innovative new forms of on-line learning developed specifically for the needs of humanities teaching and learning. The proposed course, with its corresponding learning and teaching environment, is the first step in achieving this vision.
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The elective 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 Computer Sciences programmes. Our course will not focus on programming in itself, but on its concrete use and situated problems within the humanities.
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We will teach a higher level, dynamically typed programming language, better suited to the needs of the humanities, rather than the statically type, lower level ones (Java, C++) that most CS programmes use. Concretely, we would like to use JavaScript since this is rapidly becoming the lingua franca of the internet. Moreover, JavaScript can be run in a browser as well as on the server.
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The proposed course comes from the 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. At the moment we have to resort to ad-hoc solutions (programming handbooks, online tutorials) that are not designed for our purposes.
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Combining different programming skill sets allows 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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These environments will provide detailed metrics of the course. They can monitor the progress that the (individual and collective) students make and indicate where they encounter problems.
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For instructors, this means that the course can be continuously tweaked and improved on the basis of factual information.
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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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Programmes could choose to include this course in their first year BA. This mode of teaching could thus be part of the solution to the 12 contact hours requirement problem.
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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 advanced BA and MA courses.
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By offering this "online first" course as a pilot study, the faculty can safely and gradually implement these new, cost-efficient modes of teaching.
Programming offers opportunities for new kinds of collaborative work. Larger research projects no longer need to be divided into several topics or objects, but people can divide labor through different tasks and skill sets, using tools developed by humanities scholars for humanities scholarship.
The various research techniques that will be explored in our course are:
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imaging, translation, mapping
example: Bosch project
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visualization, filtering, searching
example: New York Times Guantanamo project
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publishing, linking
example: Public Knowledge Project
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crowdsourcing, annotation, translation
This kind of large scale collaborative projects will make the humanities more attractive for external funding.
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We want to collaborate with international academic, public, 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.
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This course could also act as a model internationally for humanities programming and online learning. We already reached out to several, renowned universities abroad about working together on this project.
We propose to implement this course as an "online first" course, in which students study and work collaboratively in an online 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.
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Knowledge of basic programming building blocks that carry over to almost all programming languages
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Knowledge of web-based, client and server side services
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Insight in technological aspects of humanities research
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Skills in analysing humanities questions and material from a coding perspective
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Experience in project-based collaborative humanities research
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4 weeks intensive course, 6 ECTS
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pilot: elective for selected students in block C in semester 2 (2013-2014)
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course: elective for all humanities students in block C in both semesters 1 and 2 (yearly from 2014-2015)
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an online environment with JavaScript assignments that provides immediate feedback
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online first course: students carry out assignments online and in small groups (2-5 students), with two or three Q&A sessions. This mode of teaching and learning encourages peer-feedback
- the advantage of an online course is that students (and staff members) can do the course at any time. Only the Q&A sessions require students to register for the course in the C block.
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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 online and students get instant feedback