Encouraged, Not Required
I think Digital Humanities should have coding as a large preference or strongly suggested, but I do not believe it should be required. Of course, even if it were required, I think it could be waived for students with dyslexia or students that are double majoring. If it were a requirement, I would think it just means passing a class with the programming language of choice, that is probably the best way for it to be tested.
I have a friend who goes to university at the University of Florida who is an Electrical Engineer major with some coding experience. I will refer to him as Samod. We had a long discussion about a similar premise. Some people may feel they are not meant to code, it might be a struggle. For me, I had a mental block for a long time being that it’s something I simply couldn’t do, but the negative mindset could very well have hindered my ability. Instead we looked at it from the perspective of what should be expected of me. I definitely wouldn’t be a Computer Science major, but it is reasonable for me to expect to become proficient in a programming language of choice given an appropriate amount of time and if I utilize my resources. These would be online tutorials, attending class lectures, and office hours from the professors. Maybe other students would have similar experiences if they disliked coding. I say this as someone who had some experience with HTML in high school.
“On the one hand, I can see now that I was being taught fundamentals: variables, arrays, sorts, conditionals, operators, and the like. Absent, on the other hand, was any sense of why anyone would want to learn programming.”
Matt Kirschenbaum, Hello Worlds (why humanities students should learn to program)
Coding is useful at giving exposure to a lot of fields. I believe that if it is woven well into the course, it could be a meaningful experience for students. It really does need to be emphasized that perfection and mastery is not the expectation. Even if you do not necessarily need coding, knowing it is useful as even if you are hiring someone else to do the job for you, understanding what coding on the backend looks like could give you better insight on what are feasible ways to have things arranged.
Personal Experience
I had very particular notes about my coding experience. In high school, we used <br> a lot to do the equivalent of hitting “enter” in a document. I have been seeing that very, very infrequently. Even on the class website page for this assignment, I only really saw the use of <br> in the comment section, nowhere else. To my understanding, it is generally better to section off the bodies with specific tags, as we saw in class. Maybe for an introductory class, the <br> is used more frequently since it is simpler to understand.
<pre>
<html>
<body>
In the code, you can see that there are a million spaces before this but it won't show up
in the resolved
text.
<br>
Now, this will be on a new line because I broke apart the text!
</body>
</html>
</pre>
In the code, you can see that there are a million spaces before this but it won’t show up
in the resolved
text.
Now, this will be on a new line because I broke apart the text!
1 thought on “Week 2 Coding Lab”
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Kevin, I really appreciate the insights you’re giving here, especially in the last paragraph before “Personal Experience”. Having just an beginner understanding of coding could go such a long way, mastery is not necessary! I think that subtly interweaving digital skill pieces—like coding—into courses could be really valuable and increase interest in the field if it’s integrated well with another discipline. It would allow students to see how coding could be applied to their subject of study.