
Why humanities students should learn to program - zoowar
http://chronicle.com/article/Hello-Worlds/5476
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rmah
Perhaps programmers should learn something of the humanities. Literature,
history, philosophy, etc. They are not only very interesting in their own
right, knowing a bit about them can make you more fun at parties!

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wil2k
There are universities which really combine programming with the humanities in
an integrated study.

One that comes to mind is the University of Groningen in The Netherlands with
the Information Science study they're offering:

"Information science is the branch of science that deals with the storage,
processing and analysis of large amounts of data. The study of Information
Science in Groningen focuses on information relevant to Arts: text, historical
data and communication data.

During your studies you deal for instance with these questions:

* Can a computer perform automatic translation based on a large collection of examples?

* What is the best way to store historical data in a database?

* What are good ways for people to communicate with computers?

The study of Information Science in Groningen deals with theory, experiment
and application."

[http://www.rug.nl/let/onderwijs/afdelingen/informatiekunde/i...](http://www.rug.nl/let/onderwijs/afdelingen/informatiekunde/index)

Personally I think it's very good that there are studies which don't look at
IT/programming in 'just' (not meant negatively, just not able to find a better
word at the moment!) in the Computer Science way.

There are of course also studies which combine IT and Business/MBA-like
courses.

Good, broadly developed backgrounds to have when going job-hunting IMHO. :)

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lulin
I am really passionate about this topic. I am double majoring in Japanese
studies and CompSci and try to mix the two as best as I can. I wrote a web app
for collaborative translation of classical Japanese texts for one my courses
and it was a complete success (a book partly produced by the program via a TeX
template will soon be release). I also wrote several other web apps, for
dictionaries and handwriting recognition, for example. One thing I usually
hear from teachers and other students is that they love these programs, but
have no idea how to get them. They usually don't want to learn programming
themselves, but would like to have someone who can program something simple if
they tell them to. Maybe this problem is restricted to my case (German
University of Tübingen), but there is no one here in the faculty (of the Asian
studies department) who could teach simple programming, or even state why it
is needed. Instead, I have seen people ignoring technological helpers
(morphological parsers, programming languages like Perl, Python or Ruby)
because they are "too complicated". These people will still do everything by
hand (or sometimes with word macros) that could be done by a simple program,
and will waste months of time.

Another aspect I like about introducing programming to the humanities is that
it can act as a grounding element to the sometimes lofty ideas that people
tend to have. A lot of things in the humanities (like the interpretation of a
medieval Japanese texts) seem extremely vague, but are actually only extremely
complicated. Quantitative analysis of a text can give you the means to pass
qualitative judgments.

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dstein
Another reason would be so they can get a job.

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PietroPs
awesome article! especially for social sciences,such as anthropology the idea
of modeling and algorithms would be very important in connection with
taxonomies looking at the concept of culture.. and organising knowledge for
sense-making..

~~~
yolesaber
Google's Art Project is also an awesome synthesis of programming and the
humanities (notably, visual art)

<http://www.googleartproject.com/>

