Lab 2: Coding Can Be Fun? If it’s Relevant.

An important question that I have asked myself as a humanities student is if I should learn to code. Part of me desperately does not want to do so. But part of me knows that it can be a useful tool in many of my goals for humanities. The sticking point for me is that I haven’t been able to learn any coding that feels relevant to me. It’s always been for people who are maybe going to be career coders. If we were able to put more context into coding then it might be more attainable for me. Humanities students should learn to code but in relevant ways to what they are using the coding for. 

A related train of thought is to learn coding as it is convenient. But to learn computer science topics as we would learn humanities.

“Learn to program whenever it is convenient, but start thinking about the computer sciences as relevant areas of concern right now”

Donahue, Evan. “A ‘Hello World’ Apart (Why Humanities Students Should Not Learn to Program).” HASTAC, https://www.hastac.org/blogs/evan-donahue/2010/05/28/hello-world-apart-why-humanities-students-should-not-learn-program.

What is appealing about this approach is that instead of learning coding in a void, it is more useful to learn coding when relevant and to learn basic computer science in tangent with our humanistic studies. 

My coding experience is very limited, but I have learned it in two different scenarios. Firstly I took Introduction to Computer Science. This class was very hard and tedious for me. I feel like I probably couldn’t apply any of the stuff I learned in it to any other class. The other experience I have is with manipulating WordPress files in a different Digital Humanities Class. What I really enjoyed about that experience was how the coding I learned was specific to the work I was doing and increased my understanding of the material I was studying. 

I wish I could find the example from my Digital Humanities class in the past that would be a great example of how coding can be useful to a humanities student, but I instead made a mark-up of a similar table to what it might’ve looked like. 

<table>

    <tr>

        <td>this is an example table</td>

        <td>it was actually fun to make</td>

        <td>I can do so much with this table</td>

    </tr>

    <tr>

        <td>imagine if I had tool tip capabilities</td>

        <td>I could show you so much info</td>

        <td>coding and humanities can mix!</td>

    </tr>

</html>

This is obviously not a complex block of code, but I think I had always assumed coding had to do and compute and sort. But this basic HTML stuff has shown me how even basic coding can be useful for showing data and information.