Is the Programming Historian 2 a MOOC?

'Evil Robot' by Jennifer Morrow (cc-by)

A few months ago I was asked if the Programming Historian 2 is a MOOC. For the uninitiated, a MOOC is a Massive OpenOnline Course. They’ve been popping up online for the past couple of years, principally at major American universities like MIT and Stanford, claiming to be able to teach thousands or even hundreds of thousands of students at the same time – for free. They’ve so far had mixed results but it seems most people in academia have an opinion on them – either, meh it’s a fad, damn we gotta get one of those at our school, or the robots have come for our jobs! Defend! Defend!

I can’t speak for the other editors of the Programming Historian 2 (PH2). But I can say: No. I don’t think the PH2 is a MOOC.  If you havn’t found us yet, the PH2 is an open access series of tutorials designed to let humanities researchers get their toes wet with computer programming. The lessons involve learning simple programming tasks that are immediately useful to ordinary working humanists. That might be automatically downloading historical recordsfrom the Internet, or analyzing a collection of sources with topic modeling. All of the lessons are online – like a MOOC – and there is no teacher in the room with you – like a MOOC.

So why no MOOC? For me, what sets a MOOC apart from a classroom-based course is a belief that the tutor-tutee relationship can be depersonalized and made redundant. MOOCs replace this relationship with a series of steps. If you learn the steps in the right order and engage actively with the material you learn what you need to know and who needs teacher?

I don’t think that’s what we’re about. Instead, some of the most exciting feedback we’ve got at the PH2 has been from academics who have used the PH2 as a teaching tool in their classroom. Either they’ve assigned lessons for their students to work through, they’ve challenged students to write lessons of their own, or they’ve used the PH2 to teach themselves a skill that they can then pass along to their students.

That’s not to say you can’t use the PH2 to teach yourself some programming if you havn’t got a teacher. It’s to say the PH2 is not the evil robot looking to take your job away. It’s the friendly robot looking to give your teaching toolkit a few more options, and maybe a new skill or two with which to impress your friends and colleagues. Not unlike a book. And Books havn’t put literature professors out of a job, but they have made English lit courses more interesting.

Programming Historian 2 Lessons I'd Like to See

I've been actively part of the Programming Historian 2 team for the past two years and I've been really pleased to see so many people using and learning from the site, including a number of university courses. I learned to write Python code from the original Programming Historian, and I still regularly reference skills and techniques found in the lessons in my day-to-day research.

My role as an editor of the project means I help guide lessons contributed by others through peer review and editing. I'm also always looking around the blogosphere for people working on cool new techniques or writing guides of their own that I think would be useful for practicing historians. For the most part this is a passive process. I sit, I wait, and I watch. But every once in a while I come across something I'd really like to see. So rather than wait, I thought I'd post my personal wish list of Programming Historian 2 lessons I'd like you to write for all of us.

In no particular order:

• How do you turn a spreadsheet into a database and write custom queries? The jump from an Excel spreadsheet which you can see to a MySQL or sqlite3 database that you can't see is not an easy one. A lesson on making this leap would be well received and widely used I would imagine.
• What the heck do you do with topic models? The entire digital humanities world seems fixated on topic models these days. Our most popular lesson by far is a tutorial on Getting Started with Topic Modeling and MALLET. But what are the cool things we can do once we HAVE generated topic models? What can we know? How do we use it responsibly? How do I interpret all these numbers and topics?
• What can we do with our sources once they've been downloaded? I see so many people using programming to curate sources, but far fewer people asking historical questions of their sources using programming. What are some of the ways we can actually answer questions about the past with programming?

I'd be very happy to hear from anyone who'd like to take on these challenges and create a Programming Historian 2 lesson, or from anyone with an idea of their own they think others could benefit from. Check out our submission guidelines and be in touch.