On the cultural contrast between computer science and the humanities, and why CS is in a position to win the hearts and minds of digital humanists

Smart analysis of the cultural contrast between CS and the humanities,—including a reason (drawn from experience) why undergrads with interests in both may get pulled toward CS. https://t.co/btmvuegipB

— Ted Underwood (@Ted_Underwood) December 5, 2020

The rest of VanZandt's tweet stream:

(2/n) Hot take time.

CS depts, on the whole, are WAY better than HUMA depts at undergrad community building. Group projects as the standard, hackathons, huge undergrad TA+RA culture, active (and numerous) clubs, programming contests, undergrad conference culture, ... 3:15 PM · Dec 5, 2020·Twitter for Android

(3/n) HUMA depts do some of these things, and some of them well, but they're still largely outclassed.

HUMA has huge structural disadvantages in this "competition." Solitary research culture? That's a KILLING BLOW. How do you build community when collaboration isn't the norm?

(4/n) HUMA also has methodological disadvantages: CS students all speak a coherent foundational language of algorithms, time/space efficiency, software craftsmanship, not to mention programming languages.

In HUMA? What we share is surely important, but...

(5/n) ...it largely fails to be articulable and leverageable for community-building among, say, sophomores.

Grad students eventually learn to speak enough of our discipline's varied critical and methodological dialects, but that's far too late.

(6/n) To return to the CS+HUMA majors unaware of HDS:

They have two communities vying for their scarce time, and it's something less than a fair fight. So at places where HDS is HUMA-based, CS+HUMA majors can end up too under-engaged by HUMA to learn of and get involved in HDS.

(7/n) HUMA depts are more than capable of cultivating wonderfully engaging communities, and they oftentimes succeed in doing so to truly magical effect. But the structural advantages CS enjoys are so great that even deeply committed HUMA depts sometimes struggle

(n/n) I loved my undergrad English dept, and I loved being an English major. Spiritually, I'm English major. But the CS dept made it so easy to find community and belonging. English had my heart, but CS had my time and my presence.

FWIW, the English Department at SUNY Buffalo was an extraordinary place when I was there in the mid-1970s, and was able to create a strong sense of community within the department for various reasons, including graduate student participation in department governance, and several special programs within the department representing disciplinary specialization (philosophy, psychology, society). Still, my best experience was in the computational linguistics research group David Hays ran in the Linguistics Department. I suspect, however, that had as much to do with Hays himself as with the institutional cultural of linguistics and computation.