End-user Development and Closed-Reading: an Initial Investigation

Abstract

In this work, we explore the idea of designing a tool to augment the practice of closed-reading a literary text by employing end-user programming practices. The ultimate goal is to help young humanities students learn and appreciate computational thinking skills. The proposed approach is aligned with other methods of applying computer science techniques to explore literary texts (as in digital humanities) but with original goals and means. An initial design concept has been realised as a probe to prompt the discussion among humanities students and teachers. This short paper discusses the design ideas and the feedback from interviews and focus groups involving 25 participants (10 teachers in different humanities fields and 15 university students in humanities as prospective teachers and scholars).