Students and scholars in the humanities generally rely on prefabricated tools to guide and instruct their learning and research. We are reluctant to engage with technology through coding. This remains a major distinction between the humanities and the sciences. The sciences design, create and maintain their own digital research environments 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:
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Knowledge of programming helps students and researchers to understand the various technologically mediated objects that they are studying.
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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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There is an ever-growing demand in the public and private sector for academics who can read and write code.
Online academic education is currently mainly offered in the form of Massive Open Online Courses. There is a reasonable fear, however, that the lack of individual feedback and direct interaction in those MOOC will lead to a decay of quality of education and scholarship.
We believe, that a 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 offers the following elements:
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Online learning exercises with behaviour-driven feedback
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Collaborative assignments
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Peer-feedback in small groups, via an online platform and offline meetings
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Large Q&A sessions where students get direct feedback from teachers
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Detailed metrics of the course to monitor progress of individual students and groups of students
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.
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 online 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.