Web Development Fundamentals – Blog Post

I am most definitely for humanities students learning to code. I am also a computer science major and I get frustrated all the time looking at my code. Through all the classes and projects I have had my fair share of hair pulling moments but the joy of your code working is unmatched. I can imagine that it may be intimidating for non-programmers but we all had to start somewhere, like everything you know now, you had to learn at one point. which is why I feel important for humanities students, even all students, to learn even just the basics of coding because especially in our day and age, it revolves us. I really like the quote that from Matt Kirschenbaum:

Knowledge of a foreign language is desirable so that a scholar does not have to rely exclusively on existing translations and so that the accuracy of others’ translations can be scrutinized

Matt Kirschenbaum 2010, Hello Worlds: Why Humanities Students Should Learn to Program

I think Kirschenbaum makes a great argument here, that communication is much easier and efficient if both parties can collaborate in being able to speak the same language. Obviously if that is not the case and translations are needed to help communication, amazing work can still be done, don’t get me wrong. But the entire process of making anything becomes much easier if the intent of one is clear to the other and nothing is lost in the midst of translation. This applies in the exact same way for a programming langauge.

For example, let’s say there are two students and one knows how to code and the other doesn’t. The non-coder says, “lets add these facts to our page under the title ‘bear facts’ and make stand out from the other parts of the page”. Now this good communication but the issue is there is a lot of ambiguity within what the non-coder would picture it to look like vs. the coder. Now let’s say there is a main coder and one who knows some code. Now their sentence could look more like, “let’s have a header called ‘bear facts’ and we’ll put the facts in an unordered list and we can put it all in a div tag to edit using CSS”. Now obviously, this is one some what exaggerated example, but I think it is clear that there’s a lot less ambiguity in the communication here. Below is an example of what an example of the two could have in mind.

HTML:

<div class="bear">
  <h1>Bear Facts</h1>
  <ul>
    <li>Bears have a thick layer of fur</li>
    <li>There are 8 different species of bears</li>
    <li>In the National Football League, there is a team named the Chicago Bears</li>
  </ul>
</div>

CSS:

.bear {
  background: brown;
  color: white;
}