It’s fair to say that I agree with both Kirschenbaum and Donahue’s articles that it is useful for humanities students to learn how to code. Donahue, however, reflects most accurately how I feel about how this cross discipline work should function, stating
…all who consider themselves scholars of the humanities should realize that the discourse of programming is only the technical jargon with which computer scientists address many of the very same questions that one encounters every day in the humanities. Thus, students should learn to program, but they should not let their inability to program prevent them from engaging with the computer sciences.
Donahue, Evan. “A ‘Hello World’ Apart (Why Humanities Students Should NOT Learn to Program).” HASTAC. Accessed January 21, 2020. https://www.hastac.org/blogs/evan-donahue/2010/05/28/hello-world-apart-why-humanities-students-should-not-learn-program.
Last year there were candidate talks for an interdisciplinary position at Carleton that engaged with various disciplines such as history, philosophy, and CS. While I personally had trouble following the material at one of the mock lessons (that had more to do with my struggles with to understand philosophy than the professor’s teaching ability), I nevertheless could see that these two different disciplines were concerned with similar questions. This is what Donahue alludes to in his piece. Even though my coding skills are limited, I want to and am capable of engaging with the DH and CS disciplines. I need to remember that, even as I struggle with the more technical applications of this course.
I have a very minimal amount of coding experience, having only taken an intro CS class. Coding does not come very naturally to me, and prior to that class, looking at code generally made me want to run in the opposite direction. I was therefore very surprised that I actually enjoyed the class. I am actually capable of picking these things up, as I did with the HTML tutorials for this class. An example can be seen here:
As you can see, I can sometimes get frustrated with the process, and find it cathartic and fun to accurately reflect how I am doing while still practices using the tools I am learning.
One reply on “Learning to Code as a Humanities Student”
It was cool that you got to experience a real life example of the changes in academia at the job talk– especially given philosophy is expanding to include questions about AI in the content of their courses as well as the structure behind procedural rhetoric in both fields.