Coding: Such a Delight – and Such a Big Help

I think humanities students should learn how to code, at least at a higher, more accessible level. They don’t need to become computer science majors, but it is helpful to understand some basic principles of coding — enough to read code or generate code with helper tools or AI agents. This level of coding would significantly help them share their work in creative ways without taking years away from their own research focus. This is an era when so many people no longer sit down to read long articles but spend most of their time online, so interactive presentations of humanities research through websites can reach people so much faster than an academic paper or report.

 “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. ”

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

I am a computer science major, and I have been learning coding for almost seven years. One more important point I want to make is that coding is not hard and dry, and it can be as beautiful as humanities research. In terms of coding, I do not think humanities students need to learn how computer operating systems are built or how memory is handled in hardware (although these processes are also beautiful), but they should learn how to design websites and how to present data, just like designing a humanities research proposal or presenting findings in an academic report. As suggested by the quote above from Kirschenbaum, humanities students can also learn how to interact with information through making choices during coding and understanding the constraints of coding. The process of deciding how to present data is valuable because it lets researchers reflect on what types of questions they want to investigate and what the data may represent. For example, if we have data from different places, then a website with a map would do the job perfectly. If we have vivid records that we want to show to the public, then a website with a historical timeline can make people follow the story easily.

Some basic understanding of web design can already be sufficient for humanities research purposes. What I have in mind is learning how to select proper data analysis tools (e.g., maps, rose diagrams, word clouds) and how to build basic functions and pages of a website (e.g., hyperlinks, an about page, a search bar). All of this can be learned quickly, such as in this very course. I played with the intermediate and advanced HTML tutorials. One extra coding example that comes to mind is making an autocomplete search bar, which autofills the information users are trying to type. For example, if you have a database of many authors and want to enable a “search by author” function, you can write code easily, as the example below. Good user interactions can make users enjoy the process of searching through the website, and this feature can be done in as few as six lines of code.

<form autocomplete="off" action="/action_page.php">
  <div class="autocomplete" style="width:300px;">
    <input id="myInput" type="text" name="theAuthor" placeholder="Author">
  </div>
  <input type="submit">
</form>