After reading arguments for and against humanities students learning how to code and coding some myself, I believe that humanities students do not need to learn how to code. Coding is a useful skill that can be used to enhance the humanities field as a whole, but I don’t think it is necessary to understand humanities, something I believe that can be learned well without most technology in general. I also know that not everyone has access to the resources and tools to learn how to code, which is why I don’t think it should be required, especially for humanities students.
Coding has always seemed like a scary and unobtainable thing for me. In the past, I haven’t had the language to differentiate coding from computer science as a whole. I have many close friends who are CS majors and they’ve always complained about how picky code is, how “if you make one mistake, like forgetting a period or bracket, it just won’t work.” That is absolutely frightening to me, because as a humanities student, I rely on there being multiple right answers and ways to analyze something. I had never tried to learn to code before this class because I was afraid of how technical it seemed.
This trimester, I started learning to code in “R” for my statistics class. Even though it was a lot easier than I imagined it would be, I never felt like I used code to create new things. In R, I mostly use code as a way to get the information I want using the program’s language. When I learned HTML and CSS for this class, it was much more creative and experimental and for the most part, I enjoyed it a lot! It was fun to play around with different commands and feel like I was creating something of my own. However, I still felt frustrated at times because of how exact the commands could be, especially for CSS. I tried to add a border to my code and no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t get it to work. Even though this experience was worthwhile, learning CSS and HTML only enforced for me that humanities students do not need to learn how to code. For me personally, my limited coding experience did not enhance my knowledge of the humanities, though it did make the computer science field more feel more accessible.
Evan Donahue says in his article, “not only could the two areas [humanities and computer science] usefully benefit from one another, as per Kirschenbaum’s essay, but furthermore that in many ways the two are working on exactly the same projects” (Donahue, Evan. “Hello World Apart (why humanities students should NOT learn to program in Hastac, 2010). I believe this is true, which is why I believe collaboration is so important between the two fields. If a humanities student is struggling to learn how to code, there are thousands of people who know coding who would be able to help.
I definitely agree with you that R feels a bit different from other programming languages! R doesn’t make me feel like a “Maker.”