Programming Concepts for the Humanities: Arrays

I recently looked at the article “Programming with Arduino for Digital Humanities” in the Journal of Digital Humanities, in which researchers look into the best methodology for teaching programming to humanities students. They find a good option in using Arduino so that students receive more physical feedback for their programming efforts. Kazushi Ohya writes :

As far as our experience goes, humanities students seem to struggle to envision existence of computational world in their mind. Typical topics of programming patterns appearing in structured programming such as assignment, iteration, condition, and flow control are not difficult for humanities students to understand the formats and abstract behaviors. The problem they face is to know the need of learning the patterns or the ways to use them as substantial components making up the whole code in actual programming.

While Arduino sounds like a good viable option for humanities students, it may not be the most likely model for digital humanists to work with when they are trying to build in their field.

It is true that humanities students are often out of practice in terms of mathematical concepts, but they do understand patterns and structure. A student of medieval literature must always think about the form and structure of a text, as pieces are often very ordered based on religious concepts or a system of 10.

I propose meeting humanities students halfway and using concepts they are familiar with to teach programming.

For example, Dante’s Inferno serves as a perfect array:

Although Dante’s Hell is often cited as having 9 circles, it technically starts at Circle 0 where the Neutrals march under a banner stung by insects (therefore the Inferno is comprised of 10 circles). 

Like the Inferno, computer logic is based on a number system that starts with 0, which can be confusing for a beginning programmer, and by bringing in a concept that a humanities student would know, the gap in knowledge can easily be bridged.

Inferno serves as an array, a set that holds different types of Sinner Objects as discrete data items.

Sinners[] inferno = new Sinners[10];

Or we can say an array of Strings for starters:

String[] inferno = {“neutrals”, “pagans”, “lustful”, … “treacherous”};

Or, we can also think of it as holding Integers with each circle being an int:

int[] inferno = new int[10];