Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Stanford's New Major Integrates Humanities, Computer Science

A new joint major program at Stanford offers the liberal arts-inclined just that, integrating humanities and computer science in an experimental merger of left- and right-brained thinking.

The CS+X program, announced Friday, will offer undergraduates the opportunity to jointly study computer science and either English or music beginning in fall 2014. But the idea isn't just to study the two subjects separately - it's to pursue a degree that mixes both disciplines, studying topics such as computing technique in literary analysis.

It is, as Stanford English Professor Jennifer Summit put it, a crossing of the "techie-fuzzy divide."

What is interesting about the Stanford program, though, is that it hopes the cross-pollination will work in both directions. Jones pointed to a student who has used concepts learned from studying spatial arrangements in medieval manuscripts and applied them to programs for debugging code.


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