HTML: My Worst Enemy

I would like to preface this blog post by stressing that I am NOT a CS major, nor do I plan on converting. I took CS 111 my freshman year, and swore I would never do that to myself again. With that being said, I believe that coding is a very useful skill, and students in all disciplines can benefit from being able to understand programming languages. In particular, humanities students can benefit as the world becomes more digitized and virtual collaboration becomes more commonplace.

I have very little experience with any programming languages besides Python, so I chose to complete the beginner HTML and CSS tutorials. I thought the coding tutorials were easily digestible (especially for beginners), and I learned a lot by working through them. I struggled a lot with the macOS TextEdit app because it wants to create a default Rich Text file, and even after changing it to plain text, opening my file in Google Chrome would display the plain text of the code I entered, not the actual result I wanted to display.

During class, I was firmly on the side that humanities students would benefit from learning to code. After working through the tutorials, I still agree with that statement, but I realize that it is easier said than done. One of the main deterrents against coding held by many humanities students is that the process is viewed as very procedural, or follows seemingly linear algorithms, which sometimes can go against the “nature” of the humanities. However, as Kirschenbaum argues, “Many of us in the humanities miss the extent to which programming is a creative and generative activity” (2010). Viewed under a different lens, coding can be viewed as an art form or as an expression of one’s creativity, and it is a way to make work that might typically be found in print in a scholarly journal more accessible and readable to the general public.

One way this idea might apply to the humanities is by inserting a quote using HTML. I learned how to do this during my exploration of the tutorials, and I inserted an example below using the quote I chose in the paragraph above.

<p>Here is my argument about why humanities students should learn to code<q>Many of us in the humanities miss the extent to which programming is a creative and generative activity</q>. Therefore, they should learn to code!</p>

This all goes to say that I recognize that learning to code would be a useful skill for humanities students to have in their back pocket, and although I’m not a coding pro myself (yet), I see the practical applications that knowing how to code brings to many disciplines.