More Coding for Humanities Undergrads

Kathryn Tomasek, Wheaton College

Kathryn Tomasek, Associate Professor of History, Wheaton College, member of NITLE’s Digital Humanities Council and the member of the program committee for the Digital Scholarship Seminars responds to the recent post, “Can Humanities Undergrads Learn to Code?”

Since students in my own courses learn the basics of XML and TEI markup, I’m thrilled to learn about David Birnbaum’s “Computational Methods in the Humanities” at the University of Pittsburgh. The course strikes me as somewhat similar to “Computing for Poets,” a course Computer Scientist Mark LeBlanc teaches as part of the Lexomics project here at Wheaton College. Whilst the Wheaton course segregates instruction on XML and related tools in a Computer Science course that is connected to a course in the English department, the Pitt course originates in the Slavic department and is cross-listed in many others.

Birnbaum’s and LeBlanc’s courses inhabit different spaces in their respective institutions’ curricular structures, and the difference points to a phenomenon familiar in the text encoding community more broadly. Some of us have enough time and interest to learn intricacies beyond basic XML and comfort with angle brackets, whilst others rely heavily on the expertise of folks with strong computing skills. I have heard the latter model described as an ideal form of collaboration in which humanist-friendly computing specialists work with technology-friendly humanists, bridging what in other contexts might appear to be an insurmountable cultural gap. In any case, the courses at Pitt and Wheaton–like others at numerous institutions–demonstrate that undergraduates have significant roles to play in the practices of Digital Humanities.

The Big Tent model of Digital Humanities popularized by the Stanford University hosts of DH2011 suggests that there is room in this expanding interdiscipline for practitioners of many different stripes, including those of us who can trace our antecedents in the older field of Humanities Computing. NITLE’s role over the past few years has been to amplify the place of undergraduate teaching and learning in the big tent, and I have enjoyed seeing how the openness of the field facilitates increasing collaboration across graduate and undergraduate institutions and including the voices of undergraduates in explaining the relevance of DH methodologies for liberal education.

Janis Chinn and Gabrielle Kirilloff make a very good case indeed for XML as an entry point for demystifying code and introducing its uses for textual analysis to undergraduates. Their voices add to the growing chorus of students and faculty members who argue for Digital Humanities as a broad field that can contribute to adapting liberal education to the digital age.

I look forward to hearing more from them in the Digital Scholarship Seminar that Janet Simons and I are organizing for April.