Role of Coding in Humanities

Xingyi Zhang
Sat, 24 Sep 2022 20:46:35 +0000
Lab Assignment, Week 2, Coding

I support that humanities students should learn to code. It isn’t saying that they should learn programming to the extent of independently writing a complex program. However, I believe that a basic understanding of coding is extremely helpful. Firstly, it brings “literacy” and confidence, so that website and digital projects won’t be viewed as black boxes. It will provide humanities students a way to better gain information on other digital projects (e.g. how the data are processed and visualized). Secondly, programming exercises logic and problem-solving skills, which are also essential to doing humanities research. Thirdly, coding brings a new way of spreading ideas and works. In the era when digital media is widely used, the ability to digitalize one’s work will make it more accessible to others. As Matthew G. Kirschenbaum says in his article Hello Worlds (why humanities students should learn to program):

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

When I started learning programming in Grade 7, I was being taught data structures and algorithms to participate in competitions. For the next 5 years, my perception of programming is biased by the fact that most I learned is about algorithms, with a strong emphasis on math and problem-solving. It is until this summer in research in computer science about data visualization that I realized that coding could be used to create things. Moreover, there are a lot of useful packages developed by others that could be utilized in your project. Below is a javascript code that I wrote to generate word clouds, using the d3 word cloud package developed by Jason Davies. As shown in the example code below, by simply passing in the font, words, and size, the program will generate a word cloud.


    var font_type = '{{font_type}}'
    var words = {{words | safe}}
    var size = {{size |safe}}




I could imagine many other tools being applied for humanities use. Thus, coding will be a helpful skill for humanities students.