The main project evolves around a typical Humanities question: What is a house to you?. Although not always aware of, each one of us has a different connotation to a basic word like this. Seemingly a very simple question, it turns out to be complex to give an answer as everyone has their own take on the concept of a house. On the website the user has to answer this question by choosing one of the three images each representing a different type of house. The next step is to choose three out of six images which represent six concepts closely related to the surroundings of a house.
The user input is stored and according to the choice made, a map of Europe is shown displaying what type of house users from European countries chose. After this, the chosen concepts are used to search in the dataset the Dutch government has made public openoverheid.org. A statistical table presents the choices correlated with the data from the dataset. The table actually shows how many working, semi working and broken links are found in the public dataset.
The Coding the Humanities project introduces students from the humanities faculty of the University of Amsterdam to the world of programming. During one month, every working day, students follow an intensive course on HTML, CSS and Javascript. Experts from the industry give lectures and workshops on the basics of web development, programming, project management, databases and the students work in groups on collaborative projects.
The group of students come from a variety of disciplines within the Humanities, such as Media Studies, European Studies, Philosophy and even Musicology! They have built the website using Polymer, a new library that allows developers to write their own custom web components. The goal of the project is to learn how to program in order to have more control over one's own research. Everybody started out on different levels of coding skills, however, through collaboration and pair programming all students managed to enhance their knowledge. This project has been not only educational, but also a lot of fun (and anguish and frustration, but that's part of writing code).
As agroup of students from diverse disciplines within the UvA Humanities, we came together in the early days of june to follow the coding the humanities course. Most of us were absolute beginners, a few had some very basic coding skills. Four weeks later, after loads of coffee, conceptualization, frustration, collaboration, pizzas, drinks, polymer elements, javascript workshops, presentations, grunt workshops, pitches, posters (the list could go on and on), the resulting website is now our precious project.