Should humanity students learn to code?
As a humanities student with no coding experience I think that learning coding basics is helpful but not a necessity. I support Donahue’s final statement in his essay against humanities students learning to program in which he states:
“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)” May 28, 2010
Before working through the HTML Dog Tutorials for HTML and CSS I had no real coding experience. In middle school I did a couple projects with Scratch, which doesn’t really count but introduced me to some of the basic thought process. Also, I remember thoroughly despising it. More recently, I gained a little more experience when I was introduced to R through stats and then learned how to apply it in political science research methods.
I think more important than learning a complete code skillset is for a humanities student to gain an appreciation and understanding of the way that coding is useful and relevant. This way they are able to identify ways that code can be used and then selectively learn tools that are most relevant for specific projects. For example, it would be helpful for a humanities student wanting to share their knowledge on a website to understand the fundamentals of how that website is built. This way they might be able to customize it to better fit their needs and make a text based project more interactive or engaging, such as including images to correspond with their text. The code block below displays a way this might be done.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title> A really cool project I want people to care about</title>
</head>
<body>
<article>
<h1>Images</h1>
<p>I spent a lot of time researching this one thing. I think other people should know about it so I am creating a digital project. Here is a related image that I used code to input. </p>
<img src="http://www.mycoolproject.com/picture.jpg
width="120" height="90" alt="Relevant picture">
</article>
</body>
</html>2 thoughts on “Lab 2: Do I need to learn to code?”
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I think Scratch definitely counts as an introduction to coding, and I find Donahue’s quote interesting about how programming might not be important, but other aspects of computer science are definitely relevant now. I partially agree with that, and I think that programming can be used to make a lot of different subjects more relevant and more easily accessible to everyone. Relevance truly is very important and I’m glad you focus on that in this post.
I agree that humanities students should understand how to apply code in a useful and relevant way. There are so many ways coding can be used to advance projects across various subjects. I think it will be interesting to see how different areas of the humanities shift (and have already begun to shift) as more people gain an understanding of coding and apply it to their subjects of interest.