Interdisciplinary Teaching

We have been teaching together and leading a research group (English and Computer Science) in various ways for 14+ years (as of 2023). Here are some papers that more fully describe some of our work.

Boese, E.S., LeBlanc, M.D., and Quinn, B.A. (2017). EngageCSEdu: Making interdisciplinary connections to engage students. ACM Inroads, v8(2), 33-36.

LeBlanc, M.D. (2016). Computing and the Digital Humanities. An NCWIT Teaching Paper: National Center for Women & Information Technology. Published sets of course materials for the “Computing for Poets” course.

LeBlanc, M.D. and Drout, M.D.C. (June 2, 2015). DNA and 普通話 (Mandarin): Bringing introductory programming to the Life Sciences and Digital Humanities. Procedia Computer Science: International Conference on Computational Science, 51, 1937-1946.

“Connecting Courses”

At Wheaton, students often “connect” a computer science course with one of two English courses: Anglo-Saxon Literature or Tolkien. Check out some of the course materials to teach introductory programming in the “Computing for Poets” course.

Programming Assignments

Our Lexos tools enable you to probe your digitized texts without having to program. However, learning to write your own scripts is a powerful addition to your arsenal. Here we share a suite of curated course materials used in an introductory Python programming course where the examples are focused on texts.

NCWIT Engage CS [Search for: LeBlanc Poets ]

Digital Humanities

The use of computers to manage the storage and retrieval of written texts creates new opportunities for scholars of ancient and other written works. Recent advances in computer software, hypertext, and database methodologies have made it possible to ask novel questions about a poem, a story, a trilogy, or an entire corpus. Check out our web-based workflow to help new users perform computational analyses of digitized texts: Lexos.

Related resources

Information-rich digital humanities sites

Corpora and text analysis tool sets

Project Video Transcripts