On Teaching XQuery to Digital Humanists by Clifford B. Anderson.
A paper presented at Balisage 2014 but still a great read for today. In particular where Clifford makes the case for teaching XQuery to humanists:
Making the Case for XQuery
I may as well state upfront that I regard XQuery as a fantastic language for digital humanists. If you are involved in marking up documents in XML, then learning XQuery will pay long-term dividends. I do have arguments for this bit of bravado. My reasons for lifting up XQuery as a programing language of particular interest to digital humanists are essentially three:
- XQuery is domain-appropriate for digital humanists.
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Let’s take each of these points in turn.
First, XQuery fits the domain of digital humanists. Admittedly, I am focusing here on a particular area of the digital humanities, namely the domain of digital text editing and analysis. In that domain, however, XQuery proves a nearly perfect match to the needs of digital humanists.
If you scour the online communities related to digital humanities, you will repeatedly find conversations about which programming languages to learn. Predictably, the advice is all over the map. PHP is easy to learn, readily accessible, and the language of many popular projects in the digital humanities such as Omeka and Neatline. Javascript is another obvious choice given its ubiquity. Others recommend Python or Ruby. At the margins, you’ll find the statistically-inclined recommending R. There are pluses and minuses to learning any of these languages. When you are working with XML, however, they all fall short. Inevitably, working with XML in these languages will require learning how to use packages to read XML and convert it to other formats.
Learning XQuery eliminates any impedance between data and code. There is no need to import any special packages to work with XML. Rather, you can proceed smoothly from teaching XML basics to showing how to navigate XML documents with XPath to querying XML with XQuery. You do not need to jump out of context to teach students about classes, objects, tables, or anything as awful-sounding as “shredding” XML documents or storing them as “blobs.” XQuery makes it possible for students to become productive without having to learn as many computer science or software engineering concepts. A simple four or five line FLWOR expression can easily demonstrate the power of XQuery and provide a basis for students’ tinkering and exploration. (emphasis added)
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I commend the rest of the paper to you for reading but Clifford’s first point nails why learn XQuery for humanists and others.
The part I highlighted above sums it up:
XQuery makes it possible for students to become productive without having to learn as many computer science or software engineering concepts. A simple four or five line FLWOR expression can easily demonstrate the power of XQuery and provide a basis for students’ tinkering and exploration. (emphasis added)
Whether you are a student, scholar or even a type-A business type, what do you want?
To get sh*t done!
A few of us like tinkering with edge cases, proofs, theorems and automata, but having the needed output on time or sooner, really makes the day for most folks.
A minimal amount of XQuery expressions will open up XML encoded data for your custom exploration. You can experience an immediate ROI from the time you spend learning XQuery. Which will prompt you to learn more XQuery.
Think of learning XQuery as a step towards user independence. Independence from the choices made by unseen and unknown programmers.
Are you ready to take that step?