Blog Post Week 3

 Programming is about choices and constraints, and about how you choose to model some select slice of the world around you in the formal environment of a computer.

Kirschenbaum, Matt. Hello Worlds (Why Humanities Students Should Learn to Program), 26 May 2010, mkirschenbaum.wordpress.com/2010/05/23/hello-worlds/. 

If you had asked me whether or not humanities students should learn how to code before last term I would have said: “absolutely not”. However, after taking both intro to computer science and intro to geospatial analysis (GIS) in the same term my position has changed. I agree with Kirschenbaum and I think every humanities student should take at least one computer science course.

I took the intro to computer science course because I figured it would be a good skill to have on my resume, but it wouldn’t be applicable to anything. I was quickly proven wrong. Within the first two weeks of the term I noticed many skills that I was being taught in computer science applied to GIS as well. For example, after learning about Boolean operators in computer science class I encountered a problem in my GIS lab, the computer kept flashing at me saying: “boolean error”. It was only because of my computer science class that I understood how to fix it and was able to quickly do so to continue with my lab. I also learned about the difference between vector and raster images in my GIS class and was able to quickly understand it when it was being taught in my computer science course. The skills I learned in computer science did not only help me with my GIS labs, it also challenged me to change the way I think about and approach problems now. This can be seen through how I have approached my comps and the challenges I have faced while trying to carry out my project. By breaking down the issue into separate components the way I learned how to do in my computer science class I have been able to conduct a rather large comps project. The code below shows an extremely useful skill, the if else statement, that people can use to solve more complex questions. I have used this same structure in my comps to determine the landcover type of Carleton’s campus and what to do with each landcover type.

if (43 < 2) {
    // Run the code in here
} else {
    // Run a different bit of code
}

The quote I chose to include in this post emphasizes the fact that learning how to code does not necessarily mean how to debug code but rather how to use the data you have to create an accurate model. The skills one learns when they learn how to code can be applied to almost every humanities question, even if that question has nothing to do with coding.