[lulin]

I am really passionate about this topic. I am double majoring in Japanese studies and CompSci and try to mix the two as best as I can. I wrote a web app for collaborative translation of classical Japanese texts for one my courses and it was a complete success (a book partly produced by the program via a TeX template will soon be release). I also wrote several other web apps, for dictionaries and handwriting recognition, for example. One thing I usually hear from teachers and other students is that they love these programs, but have no idea how to get them. They usually don't want to learn programming themselves, but would like to have someone who can program something simple if they tell them to. Maybe this problem is restricted to my case (German University of Tübingen), but there is no one here in the faculty (of the Asian studies department) who could teach simple programming, or even state why it is needed. Instead, I have seen people ignoring technological helpers (morphological parsers, programming languages like Perl, Python or Ruby) because they are "too complicated". These people will still do everything by hand (or sometimes with word macros) that could be done by a simple program, and will waste months of time.

Another aspect I like about introducing programming to the humanities is that it can act as a grounding element to the sometimes lofty ideas that people tend to have. A lot of things in the humanities (like the interpretation of a medieval Japanese texts) seem extremely vague, but are actually only extremely complicated. Quantitative analysis of a text can give you the means to pass qualitative judgments.