Literacy

Computer literacy

Students should be computer literate before they take part in courses which integrate advanced computing methods or which are entirely devoted to advanced computing in the humanities.

In common parlance the term "computer literacy" often refers rather loosely to the basic skills that the use of a computer requires, i.e. the "ABCs of computing", without any particular thought given to the more advanced applications which concern us here.

Experience at various European institutions suggests that the kind of familiarity with operating systems, wordprocessing and the Internet with which students should be equipped is sufficiently universal across the arts and sciences that it is best taught non-academically, by computing services.

Although the demand for the instruction of some of these skills like for example wordprocessing and the Internet might decline in the future as the percentage of technically adept students reaching university increases, computing centres should continue even then to teach skills which are normally not aquired, like for example the handling of operating systems, but which are needed for problem solving even with windows-types machines.

Although mere "computer literacy" is really not our concern, we may need in practice to accommodate its lack until that has disappeared. The same applies to varying degrees to other fundamental computing methods, such as numerical and graphical analytic tools, as in spreadsheets, to database management software and to programming.

If this is the case, the Humanities should offer courses where the ABCs of computing are strictly taught in concomitance with subject specific computing skills. Thus, such courses should

• concentrate on the techniques and needs of and problems posed by the specific humanities discipline, e.g.
  • in literary or linguistic disciplines word processing should concentrate on the peculiarities of the specific languages or the traditional editorial styles of the discipline;
  • when introducing the Internet the specific resources available online, including the discussion groups in humanities disciplines etc. should be dealt with;
  • in text-based disciplines the introduction into markup should focus on general principles, not the peculiarities of the current generation of browsers;
  • quantitative packages should show historians how to handle fuzzy data, Roman numerals, ecc.
• be taught by teachers who have experiences in computer supported humanities research, preferably in a subject close to the one from which the student population of the course to be taught is being recruited
• be revised year by year to keep them at the shifting edge between what students can be expected to learn by themselves and what they can not.

Subject specific computer literacy

Students should have gained subject specific computer literacy before they take part in courses which integrate advanced computing methods or which are entirely devoted to advanced computing in the humanities.

Students being "computer literate" does not mean that they know by themselves how to apply this literacy to textual scholarship, i.e.

• knowing how to use a word processor does not mean that one knows how to apply this knowledge to scholarly writing,
• knowing how to browse the Web does not mean that one is able to find relevant information and to cite it in a scholarly way,
• knowing how to create a web page does not mean that one is able to encode a literary text ecc.

On the contrary, we have to keep in mind at least the following points:

• that the advent of the computer and of digital media means that there is another culturally defined medium,
• that the advent of this medium results in new cultural techniques,
• that this medium will not replace the paper based media just like the book in the renaissance has not done away with handwriting,
• that working with this medium has to be learnt in the same way as working with paper-based sources (traditional library catalogues, printed bibliographies, books, articles ecc.) has to be learnt,
• that students today have to learn not just one technique but several techniques.

For being able to do this students have to aquire a higher level of computer literacy. We call this level here "subject specific computing literacy" in order to distinguish it from the mere computer literacy. The teaching of this "subject specific computer literacy" can neither be expected nor be left to university computing centres. Instead, it is the duty of the humanities scholars to teach not only the facts and theory of their subject but also the techniques necessary to work with and exploit the medium for humanistic aims. For being able to do this it would, however, seem to be necessary, first of all, to make explicit the technical and methodological skills student traditionally have to acquire in order to be able to occupy themselves in a scholarly way with texts, and, secondly, to concretise these skills with respect to the production, reception and analysis of digital text.

Therefore, and although the present guidelines are directed to advanced computing in text based studies, you find among the types of courses also traditional courses which are not aimed at teaching advanced computing but lead students to acquire the skills needed in oder to be qualified as being "subject specific computer literate".

Courses in humanities computing

Teaching mere computer literacy or subject specific computer literacy is not, however, essentially what we're about in the long run. Instead humanities computing courses are happily relieved of the need to teach computer literacy and subject specific computer literacy so that class time can be spent on the cognitive side, for example on teaching the students how to regard numbers and to interpret charts; how to fit the concerns of a humanist to the rigid constraints of a database structure; how to analyse a problem in the humanities in terms of step-by-step computer processing etc.