Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@yeehaa123

yeehaa123/coding_the_benelux.md

Forked from marijnkoolen/coding_the_benelux
Last active August 29, 2015 13:56
Show Gist options
  • Star 0 You must be signed in to star a gist
  • Fork 1 You must be signed in to fork a gist
  • Save yeehaa123/9228050 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save yeehaa123/9228050 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Download ZIP
Raw
coding_the_benelux.md

Coding the Humanities

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.

=== 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 ===

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 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?
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment