17.075 course title and field terminology?

From: Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Jun 10 2003 - 01:39:05 EDT

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                    Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 75.
           Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                       www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                         Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu

             Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2003 06:33:07 +0100
             From: Alexandre Enkerli <aenkerli@indiana.edu>
             Subject: Course Title and Field Terminology

    Recently thinking about what I would like to teach, I turned my attention
    to a course that could possibly be called "humanities computing" if I were
    to give it in a Faculty of Arts. What I have in mind is a course in which
    talk both about practical computer use in our fields and using computing as
    a subject of research. For instance, some lessons could be on Perl hacking
    skills or the proper use of citation programs while other lessons could be
    on the history of the Free Software and Open-Source movements or the
    cultural impact of the Internet. The course I had in mind would be better
    set in the context of what is sometimes called "human sciences" and
    sometimes captured by the fixed "social sciences and the humanities" as
    used in North America.

    Such a course would attempt to satisfy the needs of social scientists as
    well as humanists both practically (e.g. statistics and qualitative data
    analysis) and theoretically (social and cultural issues in computer use).
    While it may sound broad, it could be done. What should be the title of
    this course?

    While it may well be that the historical development of the field discussed
    on this list as been a shift away from the juxtaposing "and" of "computers
    and the humanities," it seems that neither "computing in the humanities"
    nor "humanities computing" capture the potentially dual nature of both the
    field and the aforementioned course.

    Ethnomusicology, a similarly dual disciplines, has developed lengthy
    arguments on the use of "music in culture," "music as culture," and "music
    and culture." When this issue became somewhat moot, it seems that the
    preferred connection was that of the broad juxtaposition of the "and"
    connector. Interesting to see "humanities computing" moving in the opposite
    direction.



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