Abstracts Education

Seeing the Code: Text, Markup, and Digital Humanities Pedagogy

by Trey Conatser

What is the value of code in the humanities class, and what does it do for a humanities education? To what degree does code help us think about and compose texts, and to what degree can we engage with it as a text itself? Guided by these framing questions, this dissertation lies at the nexus of digital humanities; rhetoric, writing, and composition; and teaching, learning and pedagogy. It engages coding as a fixation of the global information economy: a literacy that has joined reading and writing to constitute a foundation of “moral goodness and economic success” signaling “the health of a nation and its citizens” (Vee 3).The larger argument of this dissertation is developed around the notion of seeing the code as a pedagogical framework for teaching and learning with code in the humanities. Scholars have begun to investigate how we can think about code and coding cultures vis-a-vis literacy studies, rhetoric, and the hermeneutical methodologies of the humanities. This dissertation extends the developing humanities framework for analyzing and composing with code into the larger discourse on teaching and learning with code. Just as the past few decades have seen the multimodal turn in writing and humanities pedagogy, this dissertation looks ahead to a coding turn that will just as much naturalize a peculiar medium of representation and agency as part of the teaching mission of our disciplines.The overall goal of the dissertation is to construct a rigorous, multidimensional, and transdisciplinary ethos for digital humanities pedagogy—and code-focused pedagogy in particular—that draws from research and teaching in rhetoric, writing, and textual studies; the (digital) humanities broadly; education studies; and science and technology studies. Chapter one develops a vernacular theory of code by calling on a variety of phenomena and disciplines. I examine how code resonates with and advances learning goals in the humanities, particularly for rhetoric, writing, composition, and textual studies. Chapter two traces the debate on coding in digital humanities scholarship from ‘the digital humanities moment’ in the early 2010s, which raised new questions about what code can and should be doing for humanities scholarship, how code allows us to think about issues both perennial and unprecedented, and what the evolving nature of code signals for the future of the digital humanities community.The final two chapters examine extended pedagogical case studies on the use of markup language as a particular form and genre of code. Chapter three investigates the curricular and pedagogical designs behind the use of extensible markup language (XML) in the first-year writing class, and chapter four focuses on an advanced undergraduate seminar on archival research and digital scholarly editing. These case studies share an investment in leveraging markup language to render students’ compositional and/or conceptual moves visible with the goal of developing more critical and reflective learners. All in all, code provides an opportunity to advance…