I was first introduced to coding my junior year of high school , when I took the AP Computer Science class that my school offered. While it was initially a very intimidating classroom environment to be a part of (3 women in a class of 25 students) I soon grew to really enjoy my CS assignments, because each one was like solving a riddle. Now, four years later, I continue to really enjoy coding, especially at Carleton where I am able to take multiple humanities courses every year, alongside the classes required for the computer science major.

From my experience as a Computer Science major (and Spanish minor) at a liberal arts college, I agree with Matthew Kirschenbaum‘s argument that all students should learn to code. As Kischenbaum points out, many people who work in the humanities group computer science with STEM in their mind, as something based solely in facts and figures, without taking the time consider, “…the extent to which programming is a creative and generative activity.” Coding has taught me a different way of breaking down and conceptualizing everyday problems, in a way that no other class had taught me before. Further, Evan Donahue makes an important point in his article “A ‘Hello World’ Apart (why humanities students should NOT learn to program)” that computer science should really be referred to as the field of “computer sciences,” as it is a discipline, “made up of a diverse collection of different areas of work with discourses as mutually unintelligible as those of Judaic studies and film theory.” In the various computer science classes I have taken, I have made everything from a website that uses SQL queries to create a database of UFO sightings in the United States, to recreating a 1990s TCP/IP application layer protocol for organizing and retrieving documents over the internet.

While I don’t think that every single person has to love and be an expert computer programmer, understanding the very basic foundations of computer science gives you a new perspective on problem solving, much like learning a second language makes you think about the construction and sentence structure of your native language in a different way.

While browsing through the JavaScript tutorials HTML Dog, I decided to learn more about JSON, a tool which “translates” data so that both humans and computers can read and understand it. Though I had used this tool for class assignments before, I didn’t fully understand how it worked/what it was until I went through the tutorial on HTML Dog. Here’s a sample of code I wrote, perhaps outlining the data used for the Carleton directory, after completing the JSON tutorial:

var jsonString = JSON.stringify({
    name: "Emilee Fulton",
    hometown: "St. Paul",
    homeState: "MN",
    gradYear: 2020
});