Beauty and the beast: New approaches to teaching computing for humanities students at the University of Aberdeen

This paper reports on the history and development of a new undergraduate course teaching computing for humanities students at the University of Aberdeen, and assesses some new teaching approaches developed in the course. It is noted that teaching computing to humanities students appears to be viewed with suspicion by some Computer Science and Humanities Departments. The two camps seem to fear, for different reasons, that issues and practices important to their disciplines will be compromised or watered down. This paper describes an attempt to reverse any such attitudes on the part of staff and students and to take undergraduates considerably beyond mere word processing and computer literacy. Various methods and techniques used in the course are presented and their value assessed. The importance of using a consistent computer interface to helping students form a stable conceptual model of computers is considered. We reflect on the value of teaching more about Human Computer Interaction and Artificial Intelligence than is usual in Humanities Computing courses. A number of lessons are drawn from the course.Gordon Burgess is a Reader in the Department of German at the University of Aberdeen. Simon Holland is a Lecturer in Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen.For example, Sterling Beckwith (1992) has noted that major contributors to human computer interaction and artificial intelligence such as Marvin Minsky, Alan Kay, Bill Buxton, and Jaron Lanier (we could add Christopher Longuet-Higgins, Terry Winograd, Phil Johnson-Laird and Herbert Simon) are all musicians or have been involved in music at some time as part of their academic research.