Well . . .
I think that there are many advantages for digital humanists to be able to code, however I do not believe that it is absolutely crucial to one’s success in this field. I do believe that several people working on any one digital humanities project should, in fact need to know how to code. However, this sentiment does not extend to all team members. I do believe that an individual without any coding experience can, to an extent, be as useful to a project as someone with coding experience (though the former would, granted, lack the contributional versatility of the latter). Despite my previous statement, I would strongly encourage anyone interested in pursuing the digital humanities to learn to learn to code. This coding ability need only extend to the extent to which it is relevant to the scope of the project at hand (and those anticipated in the future). Coding competency need not be anything crazy or excessive, though any extra knowledge and experience would only help rather than hinder.
As Kirschenbaum says in his article entitled “Hello Worlds (why humanities students should learn to program)”: “Knowledge of a foreign language is desirable so that a scholar does not have to rely exclusively on existing translations and so that the accuracy of others’ translations can be scrutinized. One also learns something about the idiosyncrasies of the English language in the process.” Similarly, one can rely on a computer scientist to do all of the ‘grunt’ work of programming, but that strips one of complete creative autonomy, understanding of limitations/ possibilities, and the understanding of the possible interplay between data and methods of presenting/ visualizing it.
