Most of us in the humanities think our colleagues across campus in the computer-science department spend most of their time debugging software.  This is no more true than the notion that English professors spend most of their time correcting people’s grammar and spelling.  More significantly, many of us in the humanities miss the extent to which programming is a creative and generative activity.  Many different ways exist to do even something as uninspiring as writing software to manage a retail inventory.  Programming is about choices and constraints, and about how you choose to model some select slice of the world around you in the formal environment of a computer.  This idea of modeling is vital...

 

Many programmers talk openly of the aesthetics of code, using terms like beautiful or artful in the same way that a grandmaster might describe a game of chess (another formal activity par excellence).  There is even a field known as software forensics, in which quirks and tics in a suspect program’s language (the source code of a virus, say) are exploited to trace them to an individual human author, much like forensic linguists exploit stylistic features to attribute anonymous texts.

 

 

It used to be that we in English were fond of saying there was nothing outside of the text.  Increasingly, though, texts take the form of worlds as much as words.  Worlds are emerging as the consummate genre of the new century, whether it’s the virtual worlds of Second Life or World of Warcraft or the more specialized venues seen in high-end simulation and visualization environments.  Virtual worlds will be to the new century what cinema was to the last one and the novel to the century before that.

 

Importantly, “world” here means something very much like model, a selective and premeditated representation of reality, where some elements of the real are emphasized and exaggerated, others are distorted and caricatured, still others are absent altogether.  Virtual worlds are interactive, manipulable, extensible; they are not necessarily games, though they may support and contain games alongside other systems.  Virtual worlds are sites of exploration, simulation, play.  We will want many virtual worlds, not few, because reality can be sliced and sampled in an infinite variety of ways...

 

Computers should not be black boxes but rather understood as engines for creating powerful and persuasive models of the world around us.  The world around us (and inside us) is something we in the humanities have been interested in for a very long time.  I believe that, increasingly, an appreciation of how complex ideas can be imagined and expressed as a set of formal procedures – rules, models, algorithms – in the virtual space of a computer will be an essential element of a humanities education.  Our students will need to become more at ease reading (and writing) back and forth across the boundaries between natural and artificial languages.  Such an education is essential if we are to cultivate critically informed citizens – not just because computers offer new worlds to explore, but because they offer endless vistas in which to see our own world reflected.