While I think that learning to code is helpful, I think that we should accept that some people will have an elementary and cursory understanding of it rather than idealize a world in which everyone is equipped to design a complex program on their own. I am skeptical of the vocationalism, which Kirschenbaum is also skeptical of, which seems to be very hard to avoid in the discourse surrounding coding — some skills are seen as ‘useful’ while others are not, and the classes teaching coding which are usually offered have as their only goal the instruction of projects which do not seek to relate to humanistic questions but seem to be focused on a direct and discrete sense of skills which turns the coder into a taskmaster rather than a person who wonders and questions. For this reason, I am wary of a world in which coding becomes an assumed baseline of knowledge because of a standard of a particular vocational track (tech jobs) which reigns. I also disagree with the claim that computer and human language are the same– human language is meant for human connection, not simply for a brain exercise. I still find Kirschenbaum’s observation that “virtual worlds will be to the new century what cinema was to the last one, and the novel before that” (Kirschenbaum) very intriguing and true. But I ultimately agree with Donahue: I think that people who understand the basics of coding should work with people who are very informed as teams to create digital humanities projects.
Over the past summer, I learned to do some light HTML coding in order to furnish an internal wiki for the museum’s audiovisual art collection. I created and added information onto pages and learned how to create tables, attach images and links, as well as link to other pages. As with many other people, I found that HTML coding became coherent through actually making pages despite not processing a bit of it during a preliminary orientation weeks earlier.
