Blog Post 3

Humanities is defined as the study of humans in the individual, cultural, societal, and experiential sense, but as technology has become such a vital part of our society shouldn’t humans in the technological sense be studied as well? Therefore, I believe that humanities majors should learn to code.

A humanities major might not directly need to use coding further on in their studies, but learning how to code would provide many benefits. Learning to code essentially teaches another way to  creatively think about problems and being able to analyze each part of the problem to come up with a solution. This way of thinking is extremely helpful and can extend to other areas, such as writing, enhancing a person’s ability to create more creative and well structured writings. Learning to code would also allow those in humanities and sciences to better understand and communicate with each other.

“I believe that, increasingly, an appreciation of how complex ideas can be imagined and expressed as a set of formal procedures — rules, models, algorithms — in the virtual space of a computer will be an essential element of a humanities education.”

Matt Kirschenbaum, Hello Worlds: Why Humanities Students Should Learn to Program

I liked this quote by Matthew Kirschenbaum because, similarly to what I touched upon in my argument, learning to code facilitates a broader understanding of non-coding concepts by enabling skill to break down complex topics into more manageable components. 

As a computer science major, I had some experience with coding prior to taking the Hacking in Humanities course. During my sophomore year I took my first computer science course, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Although, when I first started learning about the concepts used in coding, like array and linked lists, I was unsure of how they were relevant in the big picture of things but after continuing on in the major and learning more about data structure and algorithm I know see how everything pieces together.

class vehicle:
    def __init__(self, color):
        self.color = color
    def run(self):
        print("car is running")
    def whatColor(self):
        print("I am the color", self.color)
    def howmany(self):
        print()

car = vehicle("black")
print(car.color)
car.run()
car.whatColor()