Itinera's Displacements: A Roundtable

Learning to Code in the Digital Humanities

The process of working mindfully with digital computing sits at the heart of Itinera as it is enacted within the Visual Media Workshop. Why we are using computing to get at our interpretations is as important as the individual effectiveness of our techniques. From a traditional computer science point-of-view, learning the "grammar" of computing often precedes the functional experience of using this tool in a context important to the student. In the VMW, we try to provide real-world experience for students to work with, through, and around digital computers, focusing more on their acquisition of a sense of self-sufficiency than on individual tasks completed, data entered, or lines of code written.

For more thoughts on this approach, please see, David Birnbaum and Alison Langmead. “Task-Driven Programming Pedagogy in the Digital Humanities,” in New Directions for Computing Education: Embedding Computing across Disciplines, edited by Samuel B. Fee, Amanda M. Holland-Minkley, and Tom Lombardi (New York: Springer, 2017), 63-85.