From the readings this week, I found the bit about literate programming (in Teaching Computer-Assisted Text Analysis) fascinating. This is the first I have heard of the practice, but this is the theoretical stuff that I love about the digital humanities. The idea is that instead of writing code, and maybe adding one or two simple phrases (comments) as a note to yourself or other programmers, you write mostly prose, with a little computer code added to make the thing work. Knuth says, “Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.” It is important, I think, to show the human influence behind everything computers do. There is a sort of ideology that is popular these days, where people (very smart people) think that computers will someday become smarter than humans, or that we will somehow be able to download our consciousness onto computers and live forever. I think this point of view devalues human intelligence and fetishizes technology (and maybe even misunderstands how computers work). Literate programming reminds us that we are ultimately working to benefit humanity, not the machines.