A Humanities Student’s First Experience Coding

I am, and always have been a humanities student. At Carleton, I major in psychology and have taken numerous language, arts, and politics courses. In high school, I took IB higher level film, global politics, and English courses. With that being said, I fundamentally believe that everyone should have a basic understanding and background in computer science and coding. I do not yet have this background, but in the technology-heavy and internet-era times that we live in today, being able to not only understand but recreate and share coding informations is very important.

As put by Matthew G Kirschembaum, it is important to have “procedural literacy,” an understanding of virtual worlds and how they are both made and run. In the virtual space, complex ideas are imagined and expressed as a set of formal procedures, rules, models, and algorithms. Learning how to make models is an important skill, for people of all academic backgrounds. Kirschembaum later writes, “if only someone had told me I wasn’t learning to manage a hardware store, I was learning to build models.”

“If only someone had told me I wasn’t learning to manage a hardware store, I was learning to build models.”

Matthew G Kirschembaum

I use the internet every single day, and have always been interested in learning how websites are built as well as the “behind-the-scenes” of web design. For that reason, I was very interested in learning basic HTML and CSS, for which I took introductory courses on the HTMLdog.com website. Despite my belief that coding is important, I have never done any coding before. I used “Scratch,” a child-friendly coding tool when I was in middle school, but I have no memory of anything that I learned during my time using the tool. Therefore, the tutorials on HTMLdog.com were my first introductions to web design.

I first learned that HTML is a foundation of a large amount of web design, and that HTML files are simply text files run on a simple text editor. Following the tutorial, I learned step by step how website creation begins. This began with making a “body” section and writing basic code to put text that I wrote onto a webpage. Next, I set up different paragraphs and wrote code to place them all over the webpage. I found it interesting that something as simple as adding paragraph spacing in between different words and sentences took so much different code.

I later learned how to add lists, both bullet points and numbered, ordered lists by fadding either ordered or unordered code. Then, I learned how to put in images, by placing in an image link that I found online. I tried doing this on my own by putting an image of one of my favorite album covers on the page. There was a lot more that I learned with both HTML and with CSS, such as how to use colors and how to add a place for putting in a user’s name or comments.

Overall, I was glad to have a basic understanding of how HTML coding can create webpages. These brief tutorials only strengthened my belief that learning coding is essential, as these tutorials made the experience easy to follow and also accessible for anyone regardless of background.

This is an example of HTML code that I put on this blog post!