There is an ongoing debate about the importance of learning to code within the humanities. Should all digital humanities students know how to code? In my opinion they should have some basic understanding of the processes. Key to my stance is the idea that specialization is still important. Teamwork between someone who is great at coding and someone who has spent so much time understanding a subject within the humanities is the most efficient way to share knowledge. In my eyes, what a basic understanding of coding can do is bring perspective to the humanist and allow them to form some common ground with the coding specialist. This is why I don’t necessarily believe that any humanities student needs to become an expert in coding, but they should at least learn about the basics.
This is similar to what Matthew Kirschenbaum argues in his article on this debate. At one point he 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, Matthew G. “Hello World (Why Humanities Students Should Learn to Program).” Word Press, 23 May 2010, mkirschenbaum.wordpress.com/2010/05/23/hello-worlds/. Accessed 19 Jan.
2023.
To me, this highlights the unseen side of coding, which is what Kirschenbaum tries to highlight. He was an english major in college who started to learn the value of coding post-graduation. I did not go into his article thinking I could be convinced of the value of coding– to be honest it is not my cup of tea, but I came out of it understanding the points he was making. One of my takeaways was the way he portrayed coding as a process of presenting a “slice of the world.” This immediately drew the connection between coding and humanities in my mind. To understand coding as a humanist is to be able to communicate your ideas to someone who can put them out there (a coding specialist).
My experience with coding is relatively limited considering I struggled through R in my intro to statistics course a year ago. Given my newfound understanding for the importance of a basic coding skills, I am excited to learn some tools. For my digital humanities course we were assigned to work through two tutorials on HTML dog. Given my very limited coding experience, I decided to start with the beginner level tutorials on HTML and CSS.
One of the first things I learned is that HTML is the more structural aspect of the coding process. In our class, the professor compared HTML to nouns as CSS were adjectives and JavaScript would be the verbs. I started to follow the HTML beginning tutorial and got to a page that explained the code to bold words in the output. The code I used is <strong> and then I had to close it out using </strong>. I’ll show my example here:
<html>
<body>
I have <strong> no idea </strong> how this works
</body>
</html>This was the output:
I have no idea how this works
At first glance, I would not have thought this was anything other than a new tool I had learned to code with. What is interesting though, is what is mentioned on the tutorial page. They pointed out that typically the bolding and italicizing are done in the CSS layer of the coding because that is the “adjective” or presentation stage. To me, this was interesting that it was possible to code something in bold at a non-presentational stage. So it raised a little bit of confusion and curiosity for me as to why the <strong> code exists when the code in the CSS level is <b> for bolding. I hope to learn more about this and other coding tools in the future.
1 thought on “Reflecting on my Beginning Coding Experience”
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I really liked your post and I do think the specialization is important. I would also argue that having a basic understanding is knowing how to code at a surface level. You did not say if students should be required to take a class or not so I am not sure which line you fall on. I think not learning how to code makes it harder to collaborate in this day and age.