In Search of Humanities Computing in Teaching, Learning and Research

Introduction
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?
Courses at King's College London
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.
Final Year Projects
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.
Conclusion
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.
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