How important is the integration of advanced computing in the humanities curricula in your institution and area? Why?

Answering institutions:

Replies:

  • Lancaster University
    Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language:

    This depends on what advanced means. If it means teaching students to program, then my answer would be not at all. What is much more important is introducing students to the use and exploitation of computers at a high level. I want students to feel confident in their use of the machine as a gateway to information. I have much less interest in teaching them to construct such gateways via programming.

  • Linköpings universitet
    Department of Computer and Information Science, Natural Language Processing Laboratory :

    Since my area is computational linguistics, the question hardly needs answering. If we go to general linguistics or language learning, I believe there are many opportunities for advanced computing both for the teaching of theoretical concepts and for training language skills.

  • The Robert Gordon University
    CRiAD- Centre for Research in Art and Design Gray's School of Art:

    The use of computers within professional practice is clearly of importance in the context of product design, graphic design and in the development of modelling and visualisation techniques in the context of commissions. Multimedia is increasingly important as a tool for publication and dissemination of practice. It is out of this very practical set of issues that the use of computers within the institution has developed. In this context it is crucial that young practitioners are enabled to 'play' within the technology towards the creation of innovative visual and conceptual solutions. In the context of research, computers are increasingly used to track previous solutions and related processes as a vital part of the creation and transferability of new approaches to the field. This does not function only in the creation of new technological effects, but also in the area of mapping working contexts for artists and designers in the development of comprehensive case histories. This use of computing technology is developed further in the area of interface design with its implications for new approaches to interpretation and interaction.

  • Universitat de Barcelona
    Faculty of Filology. Department of Spanish Filology.:

    It is very important and its development has beeen very successful and greeted by the university because of two main reasons: the first one is that it has been the first experience about this new way of studying and investigating together, with excellent results, and the last one is the need to keep a quicker and more direct contact with some other Universities, according to the new needs of this technological and computational era.

  • Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour
    Faculté des Langues, Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Département d'Anglais :

    Not very, largely because of lack of resources for widespread advanced computing, and also because of a certain amount of resistance (gradually disappearing, sometimes to quite an astonishing extent) from lecturers with traditional-only approach.

  • University of Exeter
    Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture :

    Vital - it provides the only rational way of approaching a large and varied collection of material such as ours. It is also becoming more of an expectation among students, as IT becomes more prominent in the working world, that their educational institutions will supply them with more than just word-processing skills.

  • Westfaelische Wilhelms-Universitaet Muenster
    Anglistik, Arbeitsbereich Linguistik:

    Needless to confirm that advanced computing plays a key role in linguistics, especially when there are empiricist / engineering motives behind corpus linguistics.