Recontextualizing humanities skills for coding

With the rise of technical methodologies within the non-STEM research domains, such as digital humanities and computational social sciences, library science students are increasingly required to acquire programming skills to be competitive within the job market. These skills are becoming vital for those of us working in data services and also provide a bridge of understanding when discussing research methods or working with research programmers. Many LIS programs offer introductory programming coursework, but these classes can fall short for students when they do not speak to the situations we will be facing as information professionals. These programming courses often mark the first time some students have ventured seriously into STEM coursework. Many of the existing instruction approaches for programming have valuable applications to STEM skills, but are not always applicable for the use cases within libraries. Instructors of these courses need to critically appraise their teaching materials to determine if the content is of appropriate difficulty and useful for library students. Students can feel lost and overwhelmed when these courses are not presented in a way that fits their existing educational experiences and frameworks. The instruction process should be designed to build on the skills that students have already mastered, but students also need to be better prepared to begin learning these materials. This is of particular importance when teaching students who have already completed undergraduate or graduate level degrees and have specialized their learning skills to a non-technical domain. Students, particularly those from the humanities and social sciences, also face the challenge of recontextualizing their existing scholarly skills into the programming domain. This talk will focus on exploring those skills and provide a framework for students to evaluate and reflect on how they can be prepared for success in programming or other highly technical coursework within their LIS programs. Talk outline: * How do information professionals use their programming skills? * Exploration of the essential skills: ??? Writing a program like a research paper ??? Syntax errors as critical feedback ??? Iteration and poetry ??? Debugging as spell checking * LIS specific resources and groupsOpe