Patrick J. Burns

Associate Research Scholar, Digital Projects @ Institute for the Study of the Ancient World / NYU | Formerly Culture Cognition, and Coevolution Lab (Harvard) & Quantitative Criticism Lab (UT-Austin) | Fordham PhD, Classics | LatinCy developer

Coding as an Intellectual Craft

Abstract for talk given at the Colloborative for Teaching and Learning at Trinity University

Abstract

In a 1952 essay, sociologist C. Wright Mills offered his students a glimpse into his research habits and how they relate to scholarly productivity. This talk examines Mills’ idea of scholarship as “intellectual craftmanship” from the perspective of a digital humanities scholar with academic responsibilities that include being both a productive writer and a productive computer programmer. The talk builds on recent work on scholarly writing by J. Jensen (Write No Matter What: Advice for Academics, 2017), P.J. Silvia (How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing, 2018), among others, and is specifically interested in the idea of “environment,” both in the (metaphorical) sense of the optimal conditions for academic productivity as well as in the (literal) sense of the coding environment, that is the development interface that allows us to write and run computer programs efficiently.