Two kinds of computational historical thinking

The first semester that I taught a (rather incoherent) course on computational history, the course was titled “Programming in History/New Media.” The then-current state of that wing of digital history was that graduate students should learn to code. (Witness The Programming Historian.) Even at the time, I think I was trying to articulate that programming was merely a means to an end and that what we were really after was a way to think about history through computation. A good thing too, because programming came hard to the graduate students, but now an LLM can easily program anything a first-year graduate student can think of. So we may as well teach them to think computationally. Mandy Regan was a student in that first semester, now teaching computational history at Clemson. In a recent post she reflects on “Teaching Computational History in the Age of AI”: The kinds of digital work my students produce has grown dramatically over the last four years, and the growth is not…

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