I’ve always run from the smallest computer problems, and coding has been no exception. I panic nearly every time I accidentally open a web page’s code and quickly look for the little “x” in the top right corner. I think that as technology becomes more ingrained in our everyday lives, it is necessary to try and understand how it works rather than avoid it and live apart from it as I have done. Learning how to read and write a common language has been pertinent for centuries, so why not learn how to read and write in another language? I believe coding should be taught, even if only on a surface level, so people can engage equally in the humanities half of their world and the digital half.
Kirschenbaum shares this opinion, arguing that the digital world exists as just another platform to express complex ideas that already exist within the humanities.
I believe that, increasingly, an appreciation of how complex ideas can be imagined and expressed as a set of formal procedures — rules, models, algorithms — in the virtual space of a computer will be an essential element of a humanities education.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. “Hello Worlds (Why Humanities Students Should Learn to Program).” Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, WordPress, 26 May 2010, mkirschenbaum.wordpress.com/2010/05/23/hello-worlds/.
Last year, in a linguistics class, I had my first experience with actually writing code, and my first experience using the digital world to express my humanities background. My partner and I had to program Alexa to follow a certain dialogue, and after hours of us attempting to problem-solve along with our professor, we eventually conceded and the digital world bested us. This has always been my relationship with technology; I’m confident and intrigued with it up until the point I make a small mistake and am unable to find the error among everything else, eventually having to start over, or give up.
Following the tutorials on HTML Dog has been my first, and only, successful experience with coding. Even then, though I feel comfortable with HTML and CSS, JavaScript remains slightly confusing and overwhelming. I did, however, build my first “web page” via their tutorials and feel as though I understand the purposes of each of the three levels of code. Below is a list from my “web page.”
<ul>
<li>Following tutorials</li>
<li>Learning to code</li>
<ol>
<li>First HTML</li>
<li>Then CSS</li>
<li>Then Java</li>
</ol>
</ul>Just like the English language, coding has different, basic components that form a larger structure. As in my list above, HTML comes first, and resembles basic words, phrases, and sentences in English. Then comes CSS, resembling the deliverance of such words. You can yell or whisper, talk quickly or slowly. Then, finally, there is JavaScript, portraying how you would use the previous two components in a conversation with someone else. It is this similarity, this structure, that proves humanities and the digital world aren’t so different from each other; traces of each world can be found in its counterpart, and I think it is important we learn how to use these traces to our advantage.
