Humanities students should learn how to code. The study of humanities focuses on the aspects of human society and culture. Learning how to code would be really beneficial for humanities studies as we virtual models of our world can be stimulated and variables of the real world can be changed to see how the virtual world reacts to the change in stimulus giving humanities an understanding of possible outcomes of changed stimuli that could happen in the real world. Kirschembaum believes that learning how to code is about creativity and thought beyond the current state of humanity: “Virtual worlds are sites of exploration, simulation, play. We will want many virtual worlds, not few, because reality can be sliced and sampled in an infinite variety of ways”. Learning how to code enables students to be able to create virtual worlds similar as well as different from reality and be able to toy around with these virtual worlds, grasping new outlooks on the humanity and culture. Donahue agrees that humanities students could learn how to code, but disagrees with the fact that Kirschembuam compares modeling in computers as having the same structure as scholars use texts and language as models: “Kirschenbaum rightly emphasizes the forming of models as a central pillar around which the computer sciences are based, but he sells his argument short when he concludes that the modeling that happens in the computer embodies only a “familiar structure” for the linguist or textual scholar used to “models” of language and text.” I think Donahue failed to recognize that Kirschenbaum was emphasizing the fact that as models are made using text and language by scholars of the humanities, models can also be made by learning coding enabling the use of computer models to further the progression of the study of humanities.
My coding experience was quite a trip. At first, I did not really understand the function Javascript and how it functions under the covers of CSS and HTML. I was very confused why the input did not come out as an output on my website just like CSS and HTML input did, but later realized through the help of a friend that Javascript words behind the scenes. I was a little tripped up with that and it took several days to get used to the input not showing up on the website, but being aware that the information was still function along with the HMTL and CSS information.
