Programming the Humanities

I believe that learning to code can be very useful to humanities students, but is not essential in that one can be a strong student of the humanities with no coding knowledge. Similar to learning a foreign language, having an understanding of coding can only be beneficial and would never function as a liability for a humanities student. In my own experience as a humanities-minded individual, coding has been extremely challenging to learn, but I am glad that I am undertaking this challenge and hope that I will be rewarded for it in the future. The ability to create websites and manipulate the presentation of my work will be valuable for projects as well as collaboration with more technologically-minded individuals.

The final words of Evan Donahue’s statement that 

“students should learn to program, but they should not let their inability to program prevent them from engaging with the computer sciences”

Evan Donahue, A “Hello World” Apart (why humanities students should NOT learn to program)

surprised me when I read his argument. I expected Donahue to end the sentence with “humanities,” rather than “computer sciences,” because I was under the impression that he was arguing against the necessity of learning coding for humanities students. I cannot claim to know enough about computer science to know whether programming knowledge is essential to engagement with the field. However, I feel that I know enough about the humanities to know that programming knowledge is not essential to its study. Despite its non-essentiality, programming is a helpful resource and a skill that opens opportunities that would be closed to a humanities scholar without programming knowledge.

In a similar vein, Janis Chinn and Gabrielle Kirilloff, undergraduates at the University of Pittsburgh, argue against the notion that 

“coding (markup and programming) is so difficult that undergraduates trained in the humanities cannot learn it quickly or successfully, and so potentially alienating and anxiety-provoking that it should be regarded as too advanced to be considered a core component of the undergraduate DH curriculum.” 

Janis Chinn and Gabrielle Kirilloff, “Can Humanities Undergrads Learn to Code?”

Their point is that they enjoyed learning how to code and feel that it was beneficial to their Digital Humanities experience and scholarship. However, they do not insist that humanities students must learn to code in order to effectively study the humanities. They also claim that they found immediate payoff in learning XML, an acronym with which I am unfamiliar. With so many types of programming and ways of learning to program, familiarity with common languages would be useful to DH students and help connect the work of students at different colleges. Alternatively, one may argue that learning more specialized languages may be applicable for certain desired tasks and students are best prepared by learning the tools that they deem most important to their own research interests. Personally, I feel that a common base programming language or style would be most effective in connected DH students and enabling collaboration on DH projects.

Regarding prior coding experience, I am a total beginner. In a ninth grade robotics class, I participated in some coding but never had any degree of success with it. I do not remember any of the commands or language that we used in that class, and I stayed far away from robotics after my freshman year of high school. My experience with HTML Dog was generally positive. I felt that I understood what the tutorial told me to do and was able to implement it with only a few setbacks. I know that I could do some of the things I learned without reviewing the tutorial, particularly the simpler tasks in HTML. For more complex coding, I would need to consult the instructions to make sure that my formatting is accurate. Once I figured out how to put the JavaScript into my “console” on DevTools, following the instructions went more smoothly than I anticipated. I liked seeing the pop-ups appear and ask me questions or tell me a number. Below, I include a table that I programmed into my personal website using HTML.

<pre>

<table>

    <tr>

        <td>Sea Animals</td>

        <td>Land Animals</td>

        <td>Flight Animals</td>

    </tr>

    <tr>

        <td>Eel</td>

        <td>Wildebeest</td>

        <td>Pelican</td>

    </tr>

    <tr>

        <td>Dolphin</td>

        <td>Mountain Lion</td>

        <td>Bat</td>

    </tr>

    <tr>

        <td>Mahi Mahi</td>

        <td>Kangaroo</td>

        <td>Falcon</td>

    </tr>

</table>

</pre>