Blog Post Week 3

I think humanities students should learn how to code or at least learn what programs do on a fundamental level. This is because the world is becoming more digital and computationally based, and I think people benefit from understanding how the world is changing and why. Coding is a technical skill but generally a method of thinking about the world and problem-solving. Coding allows humanities students not only to apply computational solutions to their problems but also to solve humanities problems in a non-traditional way. This new approach to solving problems applied to a traditional field like the humanities has the potential to be disruptive to the field and create new opportunities. Digitizing archives, for example, has made access to educational resources more equitable by giving people worldwide access to extensive resources. Digitizing books and novels has led to the spread of ideas that would’ve been much harder, if not impossible, with the traditional print methods. As Matthew Kirschenbaum puts in his essay,

“Computers should not be black boxes but rather understood as engines for creating powerful and persuasive models of the world around us. The world around us (and inside us) is something we in the humanities have been interested in for a very long time.”

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

Students should understand how these machines work instead of thinking of them as a black box. There is so much possibility in the ability of technology to change our understanding of the humanities and, ultimately, the human experience. Simple code, such as

console.log("Hello World");

which is the Javascript rendition of the classic “Hello World” program is super simple and all programs are built up of smaller and simpler elements. I don’t think that humanities students even need to be incredibly technically skilled but understand code enough that they can parse together what a readable language like Python is saying and doing.

My experience with programming is that I started learning in middle school. We had a CS class where I picked up a bit of HTML, CSS, and Javascript to make a website and simple game. Then I started to self-study Python and tried to do all sorts of things, like making a neural network, when I was 13. I made some small things inconsistently throughout middle and high school until I was in AP Computer Science. There, I learned Java as well as more formal programming techniques. Then, I took some CS classes at Carleton and did summer research that required me to learn natural language processing last summer