Coding as tool for humanities students

I believe that all humanities student should learn how to code. Not to become experts, but to understand coding as a medium and to use coding as tool. We can’t deny that code is an important part of the world we live in, so refusing to learn it risks turning humanities students into passive users.

All programming entails world-making, as the ritual act of writing and running Hello World reminds us. Virtual worlds simply lend literal and graphical form to this ideal.

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

What Matthew G. Kirschenbaum stated deeply correlates with my experience. I believe that coding is not just technical, it is also about modeling and interpreting reality just like philosophy and history.

My first experience with coding was through Python. I took intro to cs only because it’s my major requirement for cognitive science. I struggled initially with believing coding had anything to do the kind of study I do. That changed when I started putting the interactive graphs I made in cs into my anthropology presentation. They made my presentation so fun and people loved them so much which made me rethink whether coding is an effective tool for me as an humanities student. Even though I still find the syntax hard, now I consider coding as a new language that could help me see and present things differently.

Here is an example of how we can turn some boring texts in philosophy into something fun and easy to read.

<div style="display: flex; gap: 20px; font-family: sans-serif;">
  <div style="flex: 1; background: #a18cd1; color: white; padding: 15px; border-radius: 10px;">
    <h3>Plato</h3>
    <p>Believed in ideal Forms<br>Truth beyond the physical<br><em>The Republic</em></p>
  </div>
  <div style="flex: 1; background: #fbc2eb; color: black; padding: 15px; border-radius: 10px;">
    <h3>Nietzsche</h3>
    <p>Rejected absolutes<br>Will to power<br><em>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</em></p>
  </div>
</div>

In this way, we can present Plato vs. Nietzsche side by side which helps me horizontally compare their theories.

To sum up, I firmly believe that you should learn to code even just to make your slides fun to read.