Computer science, software engineering, and humanities

A recent article on Wired (Hey, Computer Scientists! Stop Hating on the Humanities by Emma Pierson) claims that most computer scientists are deeply oblivious to humanities issues such as ethics or cultural aspects. I quite agree. However, I think the issue is a bit more complicated than this. I will explain how but, first, I’ll take a short detour.

I spent a few years working as a researcher at the University of Technology, Sydney. My home there was the Faculty of Information Technologies, which was organised in three departments:

• Computer Systems. These guys dealt with wires, routers, CPUs and other physical things. They also worked with non-physical things such as operating systems, data structures, algorithms and other low-level software entities. And by “low-level” I mean software that runs very close to the hardware and is far removed from the experience of a regular computer user.
• Software Engineering. These guys were concerned with understanding the world so that relevant problems (how to distribute water across a city, how to manage trans-oceanic container shipments) could be solved through the application of software. They studied how to design and create good-quality software, basically.
• Information Systems. These guys dealt with organisations or even the society at large, and how computers and related information technologies work within them. Usual themes included e-commerce, social networks, or smart cities.