No question ask, coding is needed in the humanities…

” Programming is about choices and constraints, and about how you choose to model some select slice of the world around you in the formal environment of a computer. “

Kirschenbaum, G. Matthew, “Hello Worlds (why humanities students should learn to program) ” . May 23, 2010 . Accessed Jan 19, 2020: https://mkirschenbaum.wordpress.com/2010/05/23/hello-worlds/

Coming from a CS and web-design background, I would 100000%, with every fiber of my being, support the notion that coding is needed in the humanities. I would go so far even as to say coding is needed in every field. Coding today is what drawing and diagramming was to the humanities 100 years ago. Technically speaking, you don’t need to be able to draw or diagram or have any sort of structure to pursue your humanitarian projects…but it helps. Like a lot.

Just like Matthew mentions, being a coder is not spending your entire life slaving away at a computer screen debugging programs, just like how English majors don’t spend their whole lives correcting grammars (Kirschenbaum 1). In fact, that’s such a small part of what us coders do that it’s actually unfair to stereotype us all under the same “freakishly nerdy” umbrella. Sure, we’re all geeky and are passionate in our own things and a few of us do actually spend all our time debugging stuff, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun to! Coding, genuinely, is what you make of it. It is merely a tool in the 21st century that should hopefully allow people to work/live much more efficiently.

Toward that end, I sincerely hope that everyone should be exposed to coding. At least to the point where you could understand the very basis of it. Coding is kind of like math: most of us would never encounter an integral in our daily lives, but we all should know how to add, subtract, multiply and find some x’s…at least for tax filing purposes. Coding, especially web-related coding, is very much that. Most of us would never need to actually know how to create and implement a sorting algorithm, but it sure is nice to be able to throw together some text file and load it onto the web with a couple of <p> tags.

Especially in this new day and age, where almost everything is digitized onto the web. Even if you’re in the humanities and not related to any STEM at all, the day will come ***SOON*** where people should publish their works online. Not only will this allow greater publicity and contributions to a given project, it will also reduce the sheer amount of resources needed to start a new project. Imagine this scenario:

You’re straight out of college planning to recreate a complete rendition of Aztec civilization. Financially devastated by your overpriced degree, you seek the help of investors out there who also want to recreate the Aztec civilization. However, you’re brand new and haven’t got much experience under your belt, so this investor doesn’t want to trust his money to you. He, or she, tells you to go get some working experience and return at a later time. So you head out and try to find a position to build up that resume…OR, you could just set up a website straight out of college and invite people already in the field to collaborate with you to put this Aztec rendition to life. Eventually, some humanity professor out there will find your project interesting and will donate some work. Then their friends will follows, and their friends’ friends’ will follow…lo and behold, you actually have contents. WITHOUT NEEDING MONEY FROM ANYBODY. It doesn’t cost much, a bunch of people will know about your projects if you optimize the website rights, and you could still find a legit position to build up the resume in the mean time!

Tl;dr. Learn to code. It makes realizing your humanitarian ideas a lot easier.

So why am I so certain and passionate about coding? Like I mentioned earlier, I’ve had prior web-designing, coding experiences from high school. Though I didn’t do as much work nor am I as proficient in web-programming as I’d like, I at least could read and comprehend most web-based code. I, without a doubt, can’t make any award winning user interface or generate some amazing search engine result. But, I can look at some code and tell you with about 80% accuracy what it means. I can also make some pikachus’ run across a web-page!

With that in mind, here’s a parting JavaScript code to tell you how amazing and capable y’all are!

var initiate = 0;
while (initiate <= 42){
     if (initiate % 2 == 0) {
         console.log("You're amazing!");
         initiate++
     }
     else {
         console.log("I'ma say it again!");
         console.log("You're still amazing!" + "\n" + "\n");
         initiate++
     }
}