A hack is a clever way to overcome existing resistances and thus expose the potential for more. I once toured MIT and was introduced to a few such famous “hacks,” including one where a police car was reassembled on the roof of a building. Though this has no immediate relation to the popular idea of a “hacker,” it is in many senses what I believe should be present in those pressing the boundaries of knowledge and the institutions responsible for it’s creation, management and distribution.

I found my way into an undergraduate program after many changes of major, IVSP at the University of Maryland, College Park. That program in many ways defined what an individual pursuing research that unites and synthesizes multiple existing curriculums could be. It did this in part by its sheer lack of popularity; I was one of 15 graduates from my year. Through the program, I managed to study Computer Science (finishing my B.S. this past semester) along with Studio Art and Creative Writing. I did not, however, learn more about those fields than anyone pursuing an individual degree. No, the largest gain was in the responsibility to forge a new direction in the same way I expect to pursue my future graduate work — and future work as a postgrad. I constructed a new curriculum which was in many senses unique and experimental, where random availability of classes and requirements were as much of a part as my preconceived notions of how the fields would mesh.

What does interdisciplinary mean? It means the acknowledgment that the problems and solutions are in many senses broken up and scattered in many places, as Matthew Kirschenbaum observes of the need of humanities students to program. The problems of identity, logic and consciousness are treated with different tools in the humanities and the sciences, and in most cases those very people that hold parts of the problem are only a few sets of walls away from one another, from those who could provide the missing piece or the perspective that wasn’t even considered.

I knew this, running from one side of campus to another in the way I approached art projects as I approached code projects, the vacillation between part and whole, design elements and tools to manipulate them. If all disciplinary boundaries were to dissolve, the process of discovery which drives the hacks that are even now reshaping how we should deal with education within disciplines wouldn’t take place. Digital Cultures and Creativity, a new living learning program that accomplishes what I had set out to do alone at College Park is one result of my former advisor’s realization of the critical space between the humanities and computer science and the arts. Each of those students will be guided through the same epiphanies I came by, but their accretion in that path will only lead to the advancement of each discipline, of perspective and of synergy. It will not eliminate the majors of English, or Computer Science. Nor should it.

Instead, it should serve as a communication link and another experiment. How do students form a community around a shared interdisciplinary program? That community will not spawn another discipline, and in fact in some ways have ceased to become interdisciplinary. They’ve become something else, something that communicates between the two disciplines in the same way the corpus callosum facilitates communication between the two hemispheres. But for something, someone to be interdisciplinary, they must bridge a divide. Programs that seek those students, and programs that become so through their regular operation are two very different things. In my mind, it was never a question of whether humanities students should learn to program, it was always why they weren’t already. It became what they could do if they could.