Week 2

Coding Seems Pretty Useful

By Ezra / September 24, 2022

Humanities Students Should Learn To Code as an Extension of Necessary Skills

I have been coding for quite a long time, starting with Scratch and Arduino. Coding has proven to be useful in my life for many reasons, including academic classes and making pointless websites and scripts for my friends ever since fourth grade. Coding has expanded my perspective of the humanities a significant bit, and I think it is very useful for students in the humanities to learn to code and program. As UMD English professor Matthew Kirschenbaum says,

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 2010

I think many humanities and computer science students view the two fields as overlapping, but many fewer see them as deserving connection and being inherently connected. Programming in the humanities demonstrates the need for computer integration in the humanities, and likewise for humanistic inquiry in computer science.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
  <title>JS Bin</title>
</head>
<body>
  <h1 title="Main Title">Hello There</h1><br />
  <p>This is a <a href="https://www.welcometonightvale.com/">test site</a> and I hope you like it. </p>
  <p>I built this website for two reasons:</p>
  <ul>
    <li>To demonstrate my <abbr title="Hypertext Markup Language">HTML</abbr> skills.</li>
    <li> To introduce you to the best podcast of all time, <br>Welcome to Night Vale.</li>
</body>
</html>

I do not see it as a inherently necessary part of the humanities, but I do think that it is very beneficial for humanities students to learn to program, especially for visualizing topics. My code that I wrote above could be expanded upon in many ways, and humanities students are overdue for a crash course.

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1 thought on “Coding Seems Pretty Useful”

  1. You mentioned how the two fields overlap and the importance of seeing the connection and intersection between them. This make me think of what the reverse of this debate – should computer science students learn humanities – might include. I wonder if the humanities is already more intertwined with computer science than in the flip-side of this debate. It would be interesting to consider what methods of research or topics in the humanities would be most relevant and applicable to computer science students.

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