Why humanities students should learn to program | Hacker News Reader

Why humanities students should learn to program

chronicle.com

9 pointszoowar8 comments

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!

Agreed. When I finally went to college after years of programming, I picked religion as my major. It's a great jack of all trades major in humanities. You get history, language, philosophy, and more. I even got a trip to India out of it.

After years of programming I felt I would gain little by studying CS. Sure I would learn, but only after going though classes that would teach me nothing or little at all in order to get to the good stuff. If I was going to throw down the money for a degree I wanted to learn something new.

I eventually went for the low hanging fruit and switched to IT with a software emphasis at a school where I could graduate much faster, this was more for fiscal reasons though. I feel what I picked up in my brief time as a religion major was extremely valuable and I came out with a lot of knowledge and better understanding of a lot that goes on in the world.

I was required to take at least the basic/beginning class of every one of those disciplines. Can people actually graduate with an (equivalent of the US) 4 year degree these days not having done so?

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...

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. :)

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.

Another reason would be so they can get a job.

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..

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

http://www.googleartproject.com/

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