Coding in the Digital Arts

I believe that no student should be required to take a CS class. All students should be allowed and encouraged to take CS classes, but humanities opportunities should not be entirely limited by the ability to code.

“While programming will indeed usefully equip one better to understand computer scientific discourses, it should NOT be taken as the necessary precondition to engaging with the computer sciences and all who consider themselves scholars of the humanities should realize that the discourse of programming is only the technical jargon with which computer scientists address many of the very same questions that one encounters every day in the humanities.”

Evan Donahue

Personally, I find this knowledge of coding helpful. With that being said, I don’t think it should be a prerequisite. For many people, coding may become an important part of their work or a new tool which they can employ to open new doors. However, the assumption that any single skill, in this case coding, would be helpful to an entire field is overly simplistic. Coding could help many people, but I have faith in those people to realize that on their own. It isn’t my place to tell them what will or won’t help them in their work.

I have taken classes on Python, Java, and R, but the class on Java (Data Structures) is what made me decide not to be a CS major and I never had a great grasp of the language. I still remember a fair amount of Python and R, though. I also know how to use the statistical analysis programs Microsoft Excel, Jamovi, and SPSS.

# Calculate Kinetic Energy
 
print("This program calculates the kinetic energy of a moving object.")
v_string = input("Enter speed in meters per second: ")
v = float(v_string)
m_string = input("Enter mass in kilograms: ")m = float(m_string)

 
e = 0.5 * m * v * v
print("The object has " + str(e) + " joules of energy.")