Coding and Communication in the Humanities

Over the last few classes, we’ve been exploring coding basics and the arguments on either side of the ‘should humanities students learn to code?’ debate. In the process of playing with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as I worked on the simple project of creating an interactive, HTML version of my resume, I’ve discovered firsthand how even a basic knowledge of coding provides me with a powerful new tool to store and present data. For this reason, it seems clear to me that coding is something all humanities students should learn how to do, because it give us many more options to present our research and data, in ways more accessible and more flexible than only through the traditional method of the written word.

In his article “Hellos Worlds (why humanities students should learn to program)”, Matthew Kirschenbaim tells the story of how and why he substituted knowledge of a programming language for his foreign language requirement for his PhD:

Almost a decade ago, I was granted permission to use the computer language Perl in lieu of proficiency in the second of two languages that my department required for the Ph.D. I successfully made the case that given my interest in the digital humanities, this was far more practical than revisiting my high-school Spanish.

Knowledge of a foreign language is desirable so that a scholar does not have to rely exclusively on existing translations and so that the accuracy of others’ translations can be scrutinized. One also learns something about the idiosyncrasies of the English language in the process. A computer language will not replace the comparativist’s need to know Spanish or French or German, or the budding medievalist’s command of Latin and Greek. But what about the student of contemporary literature interested in, say, electronic poetry or the art of the novel in the information age? Or the student interested in computer-assisted text analysis, who may need to create specialized programs that don’t yet exist?

His reasoning is one I agree with; programming empowers the humanities scholar in exactly the way knowledge of a foreign language does. Each presents a new way for the scholar to interact with his peers around the world, and to exchange ideas with them. However, I would go a step farther and say that coding is actually more useful to a humanities scholar than a foreign language is, because, applied correctly, a scholar with a knowledge of coding can create a presentation of his or her research which is accessible to those who do not even speak his language. Museum websites which feature 3D models are a good example of this – one does not need to share knowledge of a spoken language or physical proximity with the museum curators to understand how the artifact looks. However, the curators did need at least a basic knowledge of coding to publish their models.

In his response essay to Kirschenbaum, Evan Donahue argues that humanities and computer sciences “are working on exactly the same projects,” and that knowing to code should not be a barrier to humanities students to understanding and exploring computer science. While I agree with Donahue’s connection between the two disciplines, I continue to see coding as an immensely powerful tool to communicate information.

For example, as I wrote my resume up in HTML and formatted it using CSS, I was forced to rethink every piece of it, from the font to the spacing to the size of each heading, and to consider how each element emphasized my credentials. Below, you can see how I ‘modeled’ the main section and headings of my resume:

body {
    color: black;
    background-color: white;
    font-family: "avenir", "cambria";
    border-width: 20px;
    border-color: rgb(241,241,241);
    border-style: solid;
    margin: 0; 
    padding-bottom: 60px;
}

h2 {
    text-align: center;
    
}

h3 {
	font-size: 14pt;
	text-align: center;
	font-size: 14pt;
	font-weight: 300;
	padding-top: 0;
	padding-bottom: 0;
	margin-top: 0;
	margin-bottom: 0;
	
}

Using JavaScript, I could easily imagine a tool which would reveal more information about my experiences to a user as they clicked around on the page. Even with less-than-a-week-old knowledge of web programming, my resume could become a wholly more informative document than the one-page list it was previously. Given an actual working knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, I’m sure my resume and other documents I write can be way more informative and intentionally communicated than I had ever before imagined my written work to be.

Author: lieberkotzo

http://orenlieberkotz.org/