I believe it is no good for DH subject to requiring its followers to learn coding techniques. Why? Because coding is just like a language, which nowadays could be replaced by an online translator. It is a fact that we haven’t got the ability to develop a thorough enough interface that can handle all kinds of needs for DH so that students have no choice but to learn coding to develop their envisages.
Our students will need to become more at ease reading (and writing) back and forth across the boundaries between natural and artificial languages. Such an education is essential if we are to cultivate critically informed citizens — not just because computers offer new worlds to explore, but because they offer endless vistas in which to see our own world reflected.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. “Hello Worlds (Why Humanities Students Should Learn to Program).” WordPress, 23 May 2010.
I quoted Kirchenbaum’s opinion in his essay illustrating the importance of DH students to learn Computer Science. We could see from Kirchenbuam’s whole essay that he believed it is necessary for DH students to learn ‘new’ ways to engage, think, and reflect with the world, and the most direct new way is Computer Science. However, I do not think so. What DH students really need, as Kirchenbuam discussed, are scientific method ideology. Here I mean the critical thinking method to dismantle a huge question into solvable parts, solve each one in a valid logic, and build up the final conclusion based on each part’s result.
Take my personal experience as an example. I have taken two college-level Computer Science classes and five Math classes as an Art History major. All of these science classes took me a great amount of time to finish their homework and preparing for tests. However, for Math classes, I spent time solving questions, while in CS classes, I spent most of my time debugging or checking coding grammars or methods on Github. I am not saying I learned more from Math than from CS classes, but I am certain that the learning processes of solving a math question helped me more in my further study on Art History than that from my debugging experiences. I believe in the future if students could find simpler and more convenient tools to help them coding, then it would be a good time for DH students to learn some basic level coding in order to help themselves to build ideal tools.
One reply on “Digital Humanities Do Not Need Coding”
I disagree. Any tool becomes useful when it is in the right hands. Remember, programming is a tool; the only way to feel that programming is useful is to ACTUALLY USE IT. Learning something in a class does not satisfy this criteria. But I see your point: as a mathy-csy person, I think many art courses unimportant – the exact opposite of your opinion.