Should Humanities Students Learn to Code?

As the field of digital humanities has developed, and as digital tools have become increasingly prevalent both in academia and everyday life, many have begun to wonder if humanities students should learn to code. My view essentially is no, they should not. Unless they want to.

Humanities is an immense and diverse field of inquiry, investigation, and creation, and while some portions of the humanities could benefit from the use of digital tools, others may not. Many of the tasks traditionally associated with humanities work, from writing poetry to collecting testimonials, are still valid and valuable. And I believe that those doing humanities work can even utilize some digital tools, without needing to learn to code, and without being considered “digital humanists.” Reading and annotating text on a computer rather than paper, or conducting interviews over email, could be examples of research that I would simply consider “humanities” work and not “digital humanities” work.

However, those interested in doing “digital humanities” work may want to learn to code.

What exactly constitutes digital humanities (DH) work is a contested topic, but let’s consider mapping and text analysis, two prominent forms of digital humanities work. If you want to map information, like the good folks behind the “Mapping the Republic of Letters” project, or quantify the appearance of given words in an assortment of texts, as Google’s Ngram viewer makes possible, some coding experience may be pertinent.

When the digital humanities scholar wants to use someone else’s tool to do research, some knowledge of coding may enable them to “peer under the hood” of the program and ensure they truly understand what it does. And when no acceptable tool exists, some coding experience will enable the digital humanist to create or modify software to suit their needs.

So the ability to code is certainly useful for many kinds of digital humanities work. Furthermore, I think it is valuable to appreciate that the goals of coding are not necessarily disparate from those of humanists. The English professor Matthew G. Kirschenbaum points out that “the literary avant-garde has discovered computer languages, with so-called code work emerging as a new poetic genre” and emphasizes that coding, like writing, is essentially a form of world creating.

(Evan Donahue echoes and expands this sentiment, saying “the computer sciences and the humanities…could…usefully benefit from one another…[and] furthermore… in many ways the two are working on exactly the same projects.”)

Kirschenbaum goes on to suggest that the virtual words one can create through programming “will be to the new century what cinema was to the last one and the novel to the century before that” and that “increasingly, an appreciation of how complex ideas can be imagined and expressed as a set of formal procedures — rules, models, algorithms — in the virtual space of a computer will be an essential element of a humanities education.”

While humanities students should perhaps appreciate the power and prevalence of computer work, I would point out that many scholars continue to study novels–not film–in a meaningful manner. In the same way, humanities scholars can continue to analyze novels (and film) even as virtual worlds become an increasingly important form of communication.

So an inability to code should not preclude students from engaging with the humanities. Though personally, I have begun a journey into the world of code and found it quite enjoyable so far.

Dustin

One Comment

  1. You bring up a valid point that historians can use digital humanities without knowing how to code. However, I also think that scholars of the humanities should understand that coding can be used in their field and what it can do for them. Going on the lines of your thinking, the humanities could pair up with the computer science area so that digital humanities projects could be made without knowing how to code. What do you think of that idea?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *