” 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. .”
— Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Hello Worlds (why humanities students should learn to program)”, May 23, 2010
Humanities students should learn to code. They shouldn’t be required to have the same proficiency as a computer science student, but they should at least have a basic understanding of the lingo and the capabilities of what coding can accomplish.
Despite humanity being obsessed with technology and surrounded by it, coding is still a privilege as not everyone has access to the resources, technology, or education required to utilize it. Google itself is less than 30 years old, and there’s a reason why salaries in the tech industry are so inflated – a lack of supply. Therefore they should strive to be more “Renaissance Man” -ish as to not only reduce reliance on others but to facilitate more fruitful collaboration.
I had never coded before coming to Carleton, and my first experience was in Intro to Statistics. What started as a fun little exercise quickly became very frustrating as the learning curve steepened. Regression was much harder, and then Data Structures took up way more time than Intro to CS for me. Despite that, whenever something worked it was quite rewarding. The main benefits of learning to code for me has to be the logical framework of solving problems and being able to ask about coding.
If we assumed that salary could be a proxy for success, and that a dataset for all previous humanities students exist, then R could model the importance of coding knowledge for humanities students, controlling for other factors such as age and location, with the following code.
lm(salary~coding_exp + age + zip_code + gender, data = humanities_students)
I like the snippet of code you included, it seemed applicable to the rest of your beliefs regarding coding and coders.
I agree that coding is important, but, as you mentioned, not everyone has access to coding tools. While coding and technology are becoming easier to access, I think that the requirement of humanities students to learn to code would unintentionally and unfairly negatively impact a small portion of students. You touched on all this pretty well, so I just wanted to say that I agree!
I completely agree with your statement suggesting that coding is important, and should not be forced onto a humanities student. However my belief on this stands on the fact that no student should be forced to learn how to code. If we are talking about digital humanities students, or cs majors, or like majors, not knowing how to code or at least having some sort of foundation would make said student ignorant going into their studies (in my opinion).
Hey Lewis, I actually disagree with you but I found some of the points that you mentioned fascinating. We are in an age of increased technological importance especially during this pandemic with everyone forced to work remotely and it is very helpful to learn coding and we do have all the resources we need at our disposal. I too am taking an Intro Stats, but unlike you, I am taking it at the same time as this class. I think that the coding in R is somewhat easier than it would be if I was in a Computer Science class. I think that by introducing coding into traditional non-coding classes in small chunks it will encourage students to take coding classes on their own as they will already have some background and feel more comfortable.
I agree that striving towards becoming more of a “Renaissance Man” is a cool goal to have. Knowing a little bit of stuff from all sorts of areas certainly can’t hurt. And yeah, no one is expected to become an expert in coding but just having a little exposure to it can make a huge difference in someone’s education and overall intellectual growth.