Humanities computing as a field of study has many facets which can be used to
define it. John Unsworth (2000) suggested seven 'Scholarly Primitives' of
discovering, annotation, comparing, referring, sampling, illustrating and
representing. These low-level research methods combine and feed into each other
to form the basis for higher-level scholarly activity not just in the humanities
but throughout the academy. A primary task of humanities computing is to provide
the technological tools to allow academics to apply these primitives to the
range of digital data and resources available across computer networks and to
ensure the viability of these resources into the future.
Willard McCarty and Harold Short (2002) have produced a rough intellectual map of humanities
computing. At the centre of the map is a large 'methodological commons' of
computational techniques shared among the disciplines of the humanities and
closely related social sciences, e.g., database design, text analysis, numerical
analysis, imaging, music information retrieval and communications. Each
disciplinary group contributes techniques to the methodological commons. As new
applications of these techniques are demonstrated in other disciplines they in
turn are exported from the commons into new disciplinary groups. Humanities
computing is the agency that oversees this development process taking methods
from one discipline, developing them and then applying them in other
disciplines. Part of this process is the identification or creation of the
tools to fulfil the roles of the scholarly primitives described earlier. The
tools do not exist in isolation; they must be developed and used in ways that
satisfy the scholarly criteria of all the disciplines involved in their
production, which is again a role of humanities computing specialists.
The nature of humanities computing can also be explored by looking at the teaching
and learning taking place in the courses that are intended to prepare the next
generation of practitioners. Researchers who are active in the field design and
implement the curriculum of these courses. The content therefore reflects what
they believe students need to know but do these courses reveal more about
humanities computing than is written in the course handbook?
The Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH) at King's College London
offers undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes in Humanities Computing
and Digital Culture and Technology. This paper focuses on the teaching and
learning that takes place primarily in the final year of the B.A. Minor
Programme in Humanities with Applied Computing. The final year is taken up with
a practical applied computing project. This offers an opportunity to examine how
effective the rest of the programme has been in equipping the student to tackle
the ill-defined, open-ended style of question asked by researchers in the
humanities. Although the emphasis here is on the final year of the undergraduate
programme many of the issues it raises apply equally to the other programmes of
study and some examples may be drawn from them and indeed from some of the research projects at King's.
The School of Humanities at King's College London
has shown a high level of commitment to developing the effective use of applied
computing in research, teaching and learning in the Humanities. Their support
has allowed the Centre for Computing in the Humanities to play a central role in
developing humanities computing at King's and in the wider academic and cultural
heritage communities. The students on the humanities computing courses at King's
are drawn from a broad range of humanities disciplines and have opportunities to
examine an extensive set of humanities computing projects first hand at King's.
Because of this, applications of humanities computing chosen by the students for
their projects are varied and extensive. The projects vary considerably in
content and scope but many involve the creation of a digital resource; examples from recent years have included:
- a computer assisted learning module for
learning verbs with common roots in Modern Greek;
- investigating the use of
computer animation to analyse Naval Battles;
- a study of the representation of
women in three French novels from the nineteenth century using text analysis
tools;
- using a database to investigate patterns of involvement by individuals
and institutions in corruption scandals in France during the 1990s;
- exploring
the effects of the Mexican Revolution on the demography of Mexico using a
Geographical Information System;
- an Investigation
into how global warming is portrayed by Online Resources;
- an XML Mark-up
Scheme for Texts in a Virtual Museum of Latin American iconography.
The applications of computing techniques in the humanities are evolving rapidly, as
is the technology being used by the students. Many challenges are posed by this
rapid change when supervising and assessing the projects.
Humanities computing does not exist in isolation. It integrates a large body of
knowledge from the humanities disciplines and many facets of computing and information
science into a single discipline. This integrated body of knowledge has to be applied
in a way that satisfies the scholarly criteria of each of the original source disciplines.
The level of integration means that the teaching of humanities computing should affect
teaching and curriculum development elsewhere. This raises issues surrounding the
institutional role of humanities computing and new media within the contemporary academy,
including curriculum development and collegial support for activities in the fields with which
which it exchanges knowledge.
This paper reflects on
the use of project work as a means of teaching humanities computing. Pedagogic,
and more pragmatic issues are discussed from the viewpoints of both the teacher
and learner. The experiences of staff and students
on the undergraduate and postgraduate courses in humanities computing at King's
College London are used to explore the nature of humanities computing. The
project work performed in the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's
will also be drawn on to illustrate key issues where appropriate.