Humanities and computer science have long been seen as the opposite poles of one long spectrum. Computer science is strict and logical; the humanities are open to interpretation and lack correct answers. Although the marketability of learning to code is rarely disputed, is learning how to program really worth it for humanities students? In a word, yes. Coding isn’t just about software development; it’s about learning how to think differently, about learning how to create something from nothing.
I myself learned how to code in Python a few months ago by taking a class. Although I was more than familiar with computers at the time, I knew nothing about what lay beneath the surface of the video games I played. I knew code existed, of course, and that the lines would mean absolutely nothing to someone like myself whose only experience with reading lines involved Harry Potter or (unfortunately) Shakespeare. With this class, however, my mind was–to put it bluntly–blown.
The syntax of python was surprisingly logical, with barely any brackets, as I had suspected. Most of the language even used real, English words! I had a lot of fun that term, starting with drawing simple images with a “turtle” to creating a game of connect four (complete with AI!) with a partner at the end. What I took away was more than just marketable skill, though. To make a game as simple as Connect Four, a surprising amount of thought–and more importantly, cleverness–was required. I think we learned more about new ways to think from that one project than from the ten weeks before that combined! Now when I use computer programs, I marvel at the complexity that powers it and the creativity that must have been required to create it. Web browsers? Amazing. Web SITES? Insane! Especially now that I’m learning a little about web development thanks to Codecademy, the ingenuity used to develop web sites is even more apparent to me.
Matthew Kirschenbaum puts my perspective into words quite well. In his perspective, “[p]rogramming is about choices and constraints, and about how you choose to model some select slice of the world around you in the formal environment of a computer.” In learning how to code, Kirschenbaum learned how to create models of worlds from scratch using only his keyboard.
Interestingly, it seems that code is now being used as an alternative medium to natural languages, programs or games being written instead of stories. Increasingly, video games are being seen as an art form–take 2007’s Portal, for example. This simple, relatively short puzzle game is one of my favorites, and is definitely more than just plain fun–a viewpoint some progressive professors seem to share. At Wabash College, a small school in Indiana, playing the game Portal is “required reading” for a class called Enduring Questions. Judging by name alone, that class sounds like it falls squarely in the humanities, no?
Evan Donahue offers an intriguing alternative viewpoint to Kirschenbaum. Despite his misleading title to his piece (“A “Hello World” Apart (why humanities students should NOT learn to program”), Donahue doesn’t believe that humanities students should not code; instead, he sees the idea that humanities and computer sciences are completely distinct fields as problematic. To him, code is often just “the technical jargon with which computer scientists address many of the very same questions that one encounters every day in the humanities.” The two fields are themselves broken into subfields, which are often barely recognizable as the same “discipline” (“The scholar of operating systems has likely never heard of the algorithms used by the scholar of machine learning, and vice versa” Donahue states). Learning to code is just as valuable as reading Derrida–it is a pathway into an interrelated but not entirely distinct field. He believes, however, that inability to code shouldn’t preclude someone from engaging with the computer sciences. To Donahue, the computer sciences and humanities deal with similar questions, questions which can be approached in a number of ways. However, I believe his piece to be ahead of its time–in the near future, I’m sure, computer sciences and humanities will likely deal with extremely similar topics. For now, though, the fields are distinct enough, and the digital humanities (the fusion of the two fields) new enough, that Kirschenbaum’s perspective is the more applicable of the two. Humanities students in the modern day are unlikely to be able to interact with the computer sciences without learning to code, so learning to code is something they should do.
Now more than ever, the barriers between technology and all other fields are being broken down. In some schools, programming classes are as important as English. In others, games created using code are given as much literary merit as philosophical works. Understanding what runs the machines that surround us, and that may soon become part of us, is integral to everyone–especially humanities students. With the increased accessibility to tools, such as Codecademy, which allow you to teach yourself how to code, socioeconomic technological barriers are being broken down as well. Learning to code may just be one step taken to learn manners of thinking that are vital for humanities scholars, but it is no doubt one of the most important.
Pallav, I completely connect with your statement regarding your experience building a concrete project in your Python class: “I think we learned more about new ways to think from that one project than from the ten weeks before that combined!” This has been my experience as well. All the tutorials and codecademy lessons in the world are great, but until you think through the steps necessary to actually design, build, debug, and maintain an actual project, you don’t really know much!
It’s really interesting that you brought up the marketability of coding– outside of this class, a lot of the arguments for studying CS that I’ve encountered have boiled down to “this is what’ll get you a job.” I think this is part of what makes the question of humanities students coding so touchy: when people argue that coding is required for the future, many people hear “for your personal economic future.” But I think you show that looking ahead and learning skills isn’t just for getting a job or keeping humanities departments funded; it’s important for the knowledge we can gain and worlds we can build in a more interdisciplinary future.