Computer Science Does Not Belong in the Humanities

Alice K Cutter
Sun, 25 Sep 2022 17:16:20 +0000
Uncategorized

I firmly believe that it is important for everyone to have some level of technological skills. Knowing how to navigate our ever digitalized world is extremely important. In the ongoing debate about whether humanities students should be taught to code, I believe that coding does not belong in humanities courses. When I say coding I am referring to line by line code writing in a language such as Python, Java or Scheme. Although coding is very important and does boost general problem solving skills it should be taught independently.

In my experience as a computer science major, learning how to code is hard. It takes an enormous amount of time and resources to learn to write non-trivial code that can actually be applied to solve real world problems or be useful on digital humanities projects. The following piece of code is an excerpt from my Programming Languages homework. It is a function that filters a list of elements by a condition.

(define my-filter ; filters a list by a condition (fn)
    (lambda (fn lst)
        (if (null? lst)
            '()
            (if (fn (car lst))
                (append (list (car lst)) (my-filter fn (cdr lst)))
                (append (my-filter fn (cdr lst)))))))

The code excerpt is included to show that coding is not intuitive. This homework is not unique, in that it took me a very long time to write and it required a number of people to help me with. In a humanities course, if students were learning to code they would not have time for a more traditional “humanities” curriculum.

Another reason that humanities students should not be required to learn to code is discussed in Evan Donahue’s article: A “Hello World” Apart (why humanities students should NOT learn to program). Donahue argues that learning to code could prevent a barrier of entry for humanities students. He writes “students should learn to program, but they should not let their inability to program prevent them from engaging with the computer sciences.” If we require humanities students to learn to program then it could disadvantage those who do not have a background in it. In addition to needing a background in humanities, the additional burden of knowing how to code would be introduced.

Thus by not teaching coding in the humanities we remove the expectation that students have a certain level of abilities. Without this assumption of certain skills the Digital Arts and Humanities can be more welcoming to all students, regardless of their background. Everyone can bring their own skill set to the community and focus on collaborating with those whose skill gaps match up with their strong points. I believe that coding is important and worth learning but should be independent from the humanities because it would subtract from the learning experience and create a potential barrier of entry for the Digital Arts and Humanities field.

Learning how to use a computer and even how to code is important, however the acquisition of those skills should not come at the expense of traditional humanities courses.