To Code Or Not To Code

While the divide on whether digital humanists should learn to code or not seems to be a divisive question among humanities students, I think the answer is fairly simple: yes. At the heart of digital humanities is sharing, whether through modification, reinvention, or introducing data in a whole new way.Matthew Kirschenbaum talks briefly about this in his Hello World essay, asserting that “the most important audience for any computer program is a human being (because the code will be continuously worked over and shared by numerous different programmers over the course of its existence”. The best way to end up with a product that users will love and use is by creating it by oneself, and then sharing to a community. If your software is shared to people who can look at the code behind it, they can come up with new and better ways to make it present information. To do that, they have to be able to code.

However, I think it’s important to note here that not knowing how to code does not disbar you from being considered a digital humanist. You can contribute in other ways, such as using another’s software to present data, making art installations or interactive exhibits, or any other tool that is part of the digital humanities scope. Evan Donahue hammers this point home in his Hello, World! reaction piece “students should learn to program, but they should not let their inability to program prevent them from engaging with the computer sciences” While coding can become a valuable part of a digital humanist’s repertoire, it should not actively stop someone from trying to learn more about humanities or from playing with software.

I didn’t know how to code before Carleton, and I still really don’t, despite taking a few CS courses here and completing some Codecademy tutorials. I’ve struggled to learn CS because it’s very similar to learning a new language, and some difficult learning curves depending on the actual language itself. However, I still think it’s incredibly valuable. I’m absolutely terrible at languages in general, but coding relies on a fairly logical system. Miss a semi-colon, get an error. There’s not much room for wishy-washy attitudes in programming, but there is such a thing as bad code. I’m terrible at coding, but I still love the satisfaction and joy I get out of creating and making a computer do things. The concept is always kind of astounding to me, since I grew up without any technology in my house until I was already a teenager. The idea that you can break something down and make it perform for you by writing a few lines of text is a pretty cool thing! My final project for one of my classes at Carleton was a very simple re-creation of the popular game Frogger. It performed pretty badly and wasn’t very pretty, but I felt so proud of myself for creating something brand new. I think that digital humanities scholars should learn to code not just because it will be helpful for them to build the types of projects they want, but because I think everyone should learn to code.