Should humanities students learn how to code? Of course!
Why should we? Well, similarly to what Matthew Kirschenbaum said, learning to program expands our understanding of the world around us. It’s another language, another facet into figuring out how things work the way they work.
Recently, I created a CodeAcademy account and have completed a basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript course. As someone who loves the humanities but also is extremely interested in digital media and the like, coding seemed like a distant relative – one that I know of but haven’t really gotten to know that well. Through CodeAcademy, however, I was able to get a taste of coding and I can say that it’s pretty fun. Kirschenbaum writes, “More significantly, many of us in the humanities miss the extent to which programming is a creative and generative activity.” Building on his statement, programming allows for a lot of freedom but requires a lot of forethought which is great especially for humanities students. It teaches us to kind of take a step back and examine the details before jumping ahead.
But in all honesty, my experience with coding hasn’t been completely easy. CodeAcademy is great and pretty straightforward, however, there are a lot of minor mistakes that can be made in programming… and I pretty much made all of them. Whether it was with forgetting to put a semi-colon somewhere or closing a bracket, coding isn’t for the not-so-detail-oriented type. Evan Donahue writes, “… students should learn to program, but they should not let their inability to program prevent them from engaging with the computer sciences.” If programming were made to be the “Computer Science Standard of Learning”, I’d find that extremely limiting. Like I said earlier, I’m interested in media studies such as photography and film and I believe that is another form of Digital Humanities work. Similarly to Donahue’s statement, the computer sciences shouldn’t be restricted to coding; that limits students’ opportunities to learn about the world around them. I’d say that learning has a lot to do with receptiveness and without that, then the attempt to learn is essentially futile.
So overall, my experience with coding so far has been relatively good. I am enjoying this new language and the slight power trip that comes with it. As for continuing to learn and expand my knowledge on it, I think I will. And I think you should too!
I agree that Codecademy can be annoying to work with sometimes as if you leave out one character, it will not let you move on. However, it is important to learn that when coding if everything is not exact, the code will not work. I also found it helpful that you included the link to the articles we read. It is great how you see your interests intersect with the digital humanities world as film and photography can be applied to digital humanities projects. Maybe you could do something with that for your final project?