Course Content

Students and scholars in the humanities generally rely on prefabricated tools to guide and instruct their research and are reluctant to engage with computers and technology through coding. This remains a major distinction between the humanities and the sciences. The sciences design, create and maintain their own relevant digital research environments and tools, while the humanities make do with prefabricated, and often inappropriate, tools.

At the moment, there are no broadly available academic programming courses aimed at humanities scholars. However, coding skills are needed more now than ever, and even more so in the future:

1. They help students and researchers to understand the various technologically mediated objects that they are studying.
2. Developing custom tools, rather than using ready-made ones, can improve the actual practice of humanities research as well as (the quantity and quality) of its output.
3. There is an ever-growing demand in the public and private sector for academics who can read and write code.

After completion of the module you will be able to:

1. Apply knowledge of basic programming building blocks that carry over to almost all programming languages;
2. Demonstrate knowledge of web-based, client and server side services;
3. Display insight in technological aspects of humanities research;
4. Apply skills in analysing humanities questions and material from a coding perspective;
5. Reflect on experience in project-based collaborative humanities research.