Week 2 Lab Reflection

I am a supporter of coding education in the humanities. Coding itself is a funny subject for me. Even though I have been “coding” since middle school, it has been so infrequent and punctuated by long periods without even looking at a script that I feel like I have an elementary grasp on coding. Since I got to college, however, I have been more conscious of retaining what I learned from the Intro to CS course I took freshman fall. Ironically, when I revisited javascript this year, I had to ask myself “what exactly did I learn?” because it felt as if I only knew the rudiments. Upon further investigation, however, I realized that coding had given me much more than just knowledge of ‘ones and zeroes’. In the words of Kirschenbaum, I had acquired “an appreciation of how complex ideas can be imagined and expressed as a set of formal procedures.” That is to say, it made tasks like developing big class projects and even 3D modeling so much easier because I could break my end goals down into executable tasks comprised of smaller steps. By coding, I also learned the practical importance of commenting on the work and explaining what’s going on. There’s nothing worse than stepping away from your work and losing the momentum that you gained or even forgetting how it functions in general. Outside of coding, this has helped me in bettering my work from annotations to exams. Lastly, if coding has taught me anything, it’s that it can be used for aesthetic purposes from literature to web design. To demonstrate this, I’m going to make Kirschenbaum‘s quote bigger!

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<p>I believe that, increasingly, 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.</p>
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