As more students move into programs in science, engineering, and mathematics, questioning the practicality of a liberal arts education has become something of a national pastime. At the heart of the debate are fundamental questions about higher education and whether it should teach technical job skills or facilitate learning “for its own sake.” Matt Price, a lecturer within the history department, has taken an innovative approach to this challenge. In his course “Hacking History,” he uses digital technology to bridge the gap between technological understanding and historical scholarship.
Launched in 2010, Hacking History is a full-year intensive seminar on digital history. Split into two parts, half of the course focuses on seminar and lab-based work covering everything from the history of the Internet, the development of GNU/Linux and the open-source movement to tutorials on WordPress taxonomies, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Building on those skills, the second half of the course places students with community organizations to develop websites that use new media to explore local history. Past successes include working with the Kensington Market Historical Society to develop what Price considers the “best web resource on the market” available.
Price’s interest in DIY web-based hacking evolved from a passion for fixing bikes. Price defines “hacking” as learning enough code to make your projects work while “repurposing” the rest of the code from other sources. Whether building computers from salvage parts with high school students or partnering with Mozilla to run hacking workshops for kids, Price’s work focuses on bringing digital tools into the classroom.
Translating this passion to a university context, Hacking History was designed to fill what Price believes is a “real need in liberal arts education.” As more communication is happening online, he considers developing technical skills “essential” but “very difficult for humanities students to acquire through the ordinary route a tech student might take — or a science student — who might learn to program in order to do some analysis.” Learning a little bit of code pushes students outside their comfort zone and gives them the opportunity to be active producers, not just consumers, of digital information. Price has even seen students get jobs because of their knowledge of WordPress.
Price’s main ambition in the course is that students will develop the ability to “write for a public that cares what they’re writing about.” While the audience for most undergraduate papers is generally no larger than the person marking them, Price believes that the chance to write for an audience interested in local history, “lets students understand that they are part of a conversation that takes place in a broader sphere and that there is no reason for them not to participate.”
The potential for this kind of course is clear in the passion it inspires among Price’s students. Fourth-year history major Rio Rodriguez, who is part of a team digitizing the exhibits of Toronto’s Oral History Museum, sees her experience as a stepping stone for future projects. “Inspired by this class, I’m working on coding a digital experience that celebrates local queer histories through web-programmed phone-in audio installations throughout the Church-Wellesley Village,” Rodriguez said. Sarah Qidwai, another student, who is developing an online encyclopedia on Hart House Theatre, thinks that courses like Hacking History are “revolutionizing how history is taught at the academic level.”
Price sees the web as an “essential utopian dream that we need to sustain as much as we can.” When issues like net neutrality threaten to close the web, the need for digital literacy could not be greater, especially among humanities students. With the spread of online-learning resources like Udacity, Coursera, and Codecademy, this technical knowledge has never been more easily available. Better yet, if you think you are up for the challenge, sign up for Hacking History and see what amazing things you can build.
Spencer MacEachern is a fourth-year history student currently enrolled in Hacking History.
