To Code or not to Code

Many of us in the humanities think our colleagues across the campus in the computer-science department spend most of their time debugging software. This is no more true than the notion that English professors spend most of their time correcting people’s grammar and spelling. 

Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Hello Worlds (why humanities students should learn to program)”, May 23, 2013.

I am a strong proponent of the idea that members of the humanities field should learn how to code. This doesn’t mean that I believe it needs to be made mandatory for students to learn to write computer programs by any means and I don’t think students with no coding background will be unsuccessful. I simply think it’s a good skill to have in one’s toolbox. Coding goes way beyond just debugging software or optimising search engines, it’s an art form. It teaches you how to apply logical and intuitive reasoning to solve real world problems. It helps you become more independent because if you want to showcase your projects and artwork to the public, you don’t have to be constrained by the limitations of a template on WordPress or Squarespace, you can write your own HTML and CSS code and build your own website. Additionally, programming knowledge can go a long way in helping you navigate the modern world which is becoming increasingly digitised and technologically driven. I think humanities students should learn to code in much the same way as I think coders should delve deeper into humanities and arts. I believe that it is always beneficial to expand one’s knowledge beyond their immediate career path and it can only help someone if they choose to do so.

I’ve been writing computer programs since I was in 8th grade and with each passing year, have only become more confident and sure of my stance. I taught myself HTML and CSS a while ago and used that to generate my own website (apologies, it hasn’t been updated in a long time) and that really made me realise how valuable coding is. It helps you become more technologically adept and given how machine dependent the world is becoming, that can be really valuable. I’ve also had prior experience with Python and Java programming and enjoy the process of building and optimising pieces of code. Coding while informative and helpful, can also be fun and interesting. You’ve probably heard so many coders say this, but I’ll reiterate. Watching a piece of code run successfully after hours of debugging, and seeing it do what you want it to do, is very satisfying and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who is debating whether or not they should start engaging in the process of learning to write code.

There’s such a vast sea of knowledge that comes with each programming language that it’s very hard to know everything about a language even after having spent months learning it. Therefore, even having had prior experience with programming in HTML, there were a lot of new things that cropped up from the tutorials that I realised I wasn’t familiar with. For example, I hadn’t used description lists before and here is a snippet of the code I wrote where I tried to play around with this specific feature of HTML.

<h1>Some random glossary thing</h1>
<dl>
    <dt>HTML</dt>
    <dd>Abbreviation for HyperText Markup Language - a language used to make web pages.</dd>

    <dt>Dog</dt>
    <dd>Any carnivorous animal belonging to the family Canidae.</dd>
    <dd>The domesticated sub-species of the family Canidae, Canis lupus familiaris.</dd>

    <dt>Moo juice</dt>
    <dt>Cat beer</dt>
    <dt>Milk</dt>
    <dd>A white liquid produced by cows and used for human consumption.</dd>
</dl>

I look forward to exploring more of HTML, CSS and JavaScript in this class and playing around with other programming languages that are used in the DH field.