Should humanities students learn how to code? My answer is, yes! Not only because digitalization is a future trend, but also students could learn a different way to think. What’s more, as Matthew G. Kirschenbaum mentioned, all programming entails world-making which align the function of writing novels or creating movies. These three reasons make coding skills necessary for humanities students.
I think digitalization is the trend of the future. Firstly, at the information era, everything becomes digitalized. More and more people are using music apps to listen to the music they download from the cloud instead of using a CD player; few people read newspapers now, and the majority tends to read everything on their mobile electronic devices. The cost and speed of information transmitted among the digital world is cheaper and faster than that of information transmitted in the reality. This is why digitalization allows the information to disseminate more efficiently. Therefore, as everything becomes digitalized, everyone should follow the trend, including humanities students.
Moreover, digitalization allows various ways of presenting information, rendering the information more intuitive to human. For example, the site “rhythm-of-food” used the digitalization form and programming to show the trend of food people were looking for. Although humanities students don’t need to know how to create things like it, knowing what is doable and the logic underneath it through learning to code is definitely a meaningful thing.
What’s more, I believe that by learning how to code, students could gain a different way of pursuing humanities. As Matthew G. Kirschenbaum mentioned, literature was referred to as “secondary worlds”, the same as programming. This is because programming is about building a model, and the world-making is similar to building a sophisticated model. A novel or movie could transmit its author’s thoughts and views of world, the same as the virtual worlds. So I think the goals of computer science and humanities are overlapped. This is the reason I think it would be really helpful if humanities students learn a different way to pursue humanities.
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2 replies on “Why Humanities students should learn to code”
I love that you included examples like the “Rhythm of Food” project in your argument; by providing clear examples of the fruits of the junction of DH and coding, you provide a solid argument for your case! I also admire that you not only incorporated Kirschenbaum’s arguments but went further with them. By doing so, you are not only stating where you land on the subject (in line with Kirschenbaum) but explaining why you do so!
Good statement, but could not convince me that much. You said knowing what is doable and the logic underneath the app or the tool is definitely a meaningful thing, but is it really true? It may be simple for some students, but for the rest, even an intro-CS course would mean nightmare, let along “knowing the logic underneath”, which may be the main teaching goal of an intermediate-level CS course in college. I think you made a valid point on the auxiliary effect of knowing CS knowledge when studying DH, but it is also a fact that it’s hard for some students to code anything other than “Hello World“. They may have higher achievements on humanity subjects if they do not spend most of their time inside the CS lab.