Computing in Humanities Education: A European Perspective
http://helmer.hit.uib.no/AcoHum/book/
Chapter 2
European studies on formal methods in the humanities
http://helmer.hit.uib.no/AcoHum/fm/fm-chapter-final.html
2.3 Defining humanities computing methodology
2.3.1 Computing as a theoretical discipline
[...]
The following section tries to clarify what we can actually say about
the relationship between computer science and the humanities
[...]
Leaving aside these subtle shades, for the purpose of a short introduction,
the core of all applied computer sciences is more than the sum of its intellectual
ancestors, which may themselves be inextricably associated with particular
knowledge domains. Instead, we will attempt to define the core in
terms of the traditional combination of data structures and algorithms,
applied to the requirements of a discipline:
-
The methods needed to represent the information within a specific domain
of knowledge in such a way that this information can be processed by computational
systems result in the data structures required by a specific discipline.
-
The methods needed to formulate the research questions and specific procedures
of a given domain of knowledge in such a way as to benefit from the application
of computational processing result in the algorithms applicable
to a given discipline.
[...]
the preceding paragraphs do lead to a few practical conclusions
[...]
We conclude that it is pointless to teach computer science to humanities scholars
or students unless it is not directly related to their domain of expertise.
[...]
We conclude that humanities computing courses are likely to remain a transient
phenomenon,unless they include an understanding of what computer science is
all about.
2.3.2 On the roles of computing courses in the humanities
To what extent do the above definitions reflect what is actually going
on at European universities? To answer this question, we propose
to group the teaching and research carried out at the various institutions
surveyed into three new categories, using a more abstract typology than
the one used earlier in this chapter:
-
Humanities Computer Literacy. A very large number of
courses at European universities are dedicated to the provision of basic
computational skills for Humanities students. These will usually
be geared towards specific disciplinary needs: A student of Russian needs
to know how to write, display and print Cyrillic. As long as they
are related to skills only, they do not influence the way in which scientific
results are gained. At this level we are simply talking about the
application
of tools.
-
Humanities Computing. A much smaller number of courses,
and a substantial number of research projects, use computationally based
methods (like data base technology) or computationally dependent ones (like
statistics) to gain scientific results, which could not be gained without
the tools employed. At this level, therefore, we talk about the application
of methods.
-
Humanities Computer Science. An even smaller number
of courses and projects, finally, deal with the study of computational
methods themselves, aiming at their improved understanding, without claiming
directly to gain a new insight in the discipline. They are involved
with the development of methods.
[...]
