From my perspective, students in humanities disciplines should learn how to code. We live in a deeply digitized world, in which archives are increasingly housed in online repositories, and tools for text analysis, data visualization, and digital curation are advancing quickly. Coding renders humanities researchers the ability to search, organize, and interpret large bodies of materials, to build and critique digital projects, and participate in new forms of scholarship. Without at least a basic understanding of coding, it is easy to fall behind as technologies evolve and miss the gains in efficiency and insights these new technologies and tools can offer. As Kirschenbaum argues, programming is the cornerstone of world-making in a digitized age. Even a basic understanding of programming equips researchers to take part in that world-making and to build their projects.
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.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew. Hello Worlds (Why Humanities Students Should Learn to Program). 24 May 2010, mkirschenbaum.wordpress.com/2010/05/23/hello-worlds/.
Personal Experience
As a student majoring in economics, my coursework has made me appreciate how central programming is to the discipline. Many economic theories ultimately need to be justified on empirical evidence, and researchers frequently rely on simulations to evaluate their models under different assumptions. The computational methods that make this possible are implemented in a wide range of programming libraries, which means that having a basic understanding of programming is essential to use them effectively. I have enjoyed learning these methods to tackle concrete problems and have come to see how indispensable they are to contemporary economic research. I can also envision a similar toolkit, built on programming skills, greatly enriching research in the humanities by enabling new forms of analysis and interpretation.
I do not have a solid understanding of web creation, but I have started experimenting by creating a line of words with alternating colors in HTML, a small first step toward learning relevant skills and techniques!
Code Example
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Code snippet for Lab2</title>
<style>
.w:nth-child(odd) {color: red;}
.w:nth-child(even) {color: purple;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<p>
<span class="w">This</span>
<span class="w">is</span>
<span class="w">a</span>
<span class="w">line</span>
<span class="w">of</span>
<span class="w">words</span>
<span class="w">with</span>
<span class="w">alternating</span>
<span class="w">colors.</span>
</p>
</body>
</html>This is a line of words with alternating colors.
1 thought on “The Utility of Coding”
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
I agree that digital tools are now a huge part of research in many humanities fields. There’s a big difference between just using those tools by knowing a few commands and actually understanding how they work. If students know the mechanics, they will be able to adapt and utilize them in their own ways more effectively.