On a number of occasions recently, I have been struck by the basic ignorance of many professional medievalists concerning developments in computing that affect their daily lives.
By this I don't mean the latest revisions of TEI P5 and how this will affect the markup of unclear textual variants. Rather I mean much more basic issues such as what XML is and how it is different from HTML or Word; or the relationship between fonts and characters.
This has been striking to me because it is affecting basic aspects of these medievalists' work. You don't have to be a 'computer person' to benefit from Unicode, for example, and I have been surprised how many often quite complicated projects seem to be completely ignorant of fundamental aspects of humanities computing that would greatly simplify their work.
So my question is this: should there be a basic humanities computing course required of beginning graduate students similar to the research methods course so many universities require or recommend? What should such a course contain? Looking around on the internet, I tend to see two types: very practical courses that concentrate on using current software and techniques (e.g. Macromedia, Excel, Word, etc.) and quite advanced courses that focus on the trivia of building standards compliant editions. I'm wondering if there perhaps is not a need for a more conceptual approach: what is Unicode? what is XML? structural vs. display markup? how the web works. database design.
I realise these are not topics that speak to many graduate students in our field--who are, after all presumably interested in their disciplinary subject. But given how many projects now include an electronic component, it seems to me that we may be rapidly approaching the time when a medievalist should be expected to have a basic conceptual grasp of contemporary humanities computing.
What do others think? I'm thinking of asking the same question on Medtext and, phrased more generally, on Humanist. But before I do, I thought I'd ask here. I suspect the issue is more important for medievalists and classicists than it is for scholars in more modern periods: more of us seem to work more closely with things that can be digitised. Or is that discipline prejudice?
-d
-- Daniel Paul O'Donnell Director, Digital Medievalist Project (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/) Associate Professor of English University of Lethbridge Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4 Tel. +1 (403) 329-2377 Fax. +1 (403) 382-7191
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