Week 3 Blog Post: Humanities Students Don’t Need to Code

I believe rather wholeheartedly that humanities students don’t need to learn to code. They can, if they want to. But there is no reason to require it for every student who graduates. Evan Donahue puts a position similar to mine quite well in a response to Matthew Kirschenbaum:

While programming will indeed usefully equip one better to understand computer scientific discourses, it should NOT be taken as the necessary precondition to engaging with the computer sciences and all who consider themselves scholars of the humanities should realize that the discourse of programming is only the technical jargon with which computer scientists address many of the very same questions that one encounters every day in the humanities.

Evan Donahue, A “Hello World” Apart.

Programming is the specific practice of writing a computer program in some programming language. It is a process of construction, of manufacturing, although not in the physical sense we may be more used to.

Humanistic work, on the other hand, does not need to be. It examines humans through their expressions, and presents that understanding in a similarly human expression of meaning. As a history student, I read and analyze printed materials and present my findings in a textual work that can then be printed and analyzed. In the future, I may well be analyzing born-digital media and presenting my findings on digital platforms. But in the same way I don’t need to understand the inner workings of the printing press to do what I do now, there is no reason that humanities work in the future will require an understanding of coding.

humanitiesScholar + basicCoding != goodDigitalHumanitiesProject

The Digital Humanities is an inherently collaborative field. These projects regularly combine the work and expertise of varied fields and their experts. Understanding the basics of the fields of your collaborators undoubtedly helps this process. But, if you are a humanistic scholar working on a digital project with a software or web developer, that understanding isn’t coding. That would be like asking every single one of those programmers to understand the day-to-day realities of the archival research you did. It is unnecessary. Understanding focused on the big picture of your respective fields would be far more productive, and is really all that is necessary.

I say all of this as a history major with a pretty strong Computer Science background compared to other students in my department. I took two years of classes in high school and am taking CS classes at Carleton. I see merit in being able to personally contribute to the digital side of Digital Humanities projects, too. But not everyone will have that calling, and, since they don’t need those skills, there’s no reason to require them.

The best digital history project I’ve interacted with deeply remains Shahzad Bashir’s A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures. He spoke about the project to one of my classes and was very clear that his computer science knowledge didn’t include coding and didn’t extend that far beyond high-level concepts and limitations. That’s all that was necessary for phenomenal work stemming from collaboration. Why not continue to respect the varied skills and expertise of the different contributing fields?