Persistence, Self-Doubt, and Curiosity: Surveying Code Literacy in Digital Humanities

Digital humanists seem to agree that knowing how to code is relevant, if not essential for DH research. But what do we mean by “code literacy”? Is it knowing how to add markup to texts, being proficient in a general purpose programming language, knowing how to apply statistics in R, or rather having a high-level understanding of data structures? To date, various researchers have tackled this question, presenting valuable insights that are often based on their own experiences with teaching digital humanities courses or with working in a digital humanities context. However, a broadly informed evidence-based examination of the meaning and status of code literacy in the humanities remained a desideratum. To this end, we designed a survey on code literacy conducted in the field of digital humanities. The paper presents a number of preliminary findings from this survey.