Blog Post – Week 3

My position on coding:

I am going to start by saying that coding is a valuable skill that helps us not only in the digital humanities but also in many complex problems in the world today. Coding is a problem-solving skill that can help us automate simple things such as rendering websites or complex things such as sourcing out data from a file with 10’s of millions rows of data into relevant tables. One example of this is my project for my software design class last term, in which we extracted a CSV (comma-separated values) file from Kaggle about American-owned oil companies with pipeline spills throughout the world. For us to display the data of each company on our website, we used PostgreSQL to write commands and retrieve the info when requested. This all happens with a click of a button, just to show the power of coding. Similarly, it could be super useful to use coding as an advantage when creating DH projects. And yes, I am all for coding.

Code sample to support my position:

a = 200
b = 33
if b > a:
  print("b is greater than a")
elif a == b:
  print("a and b are equal")
else:
  print("a is greater than b")

This particular code is written in Python and is a simple if/else statement that prints whichever statement is true. As we can see, a is greater than b meaning, our terminal will output the third and default statement “a is greater than be” in case none of the other 2 are true.

Quotation from reading:

Programming is a creative and generative activity.

Hello Worlds (why humanities students should learn to program). (2010, May 26). Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. https://mkirschenbaum.wordpress.com/2010/05/23/hello-worlds/

This quote completely agrees with the point I made in the first paragraph about why we should learn to code. Just the idea of problem-solving is a huge part of creativity and knowing how to approach a problem and find a creative solution to it. Once the solution is found we can do all sorts of things with the data and conclusion using our skills, such as making interactive maps.

Prior coding experience:

My experience with coding is at the intermediate level at the moment as I have taken a few classes in the computer science major. Although I have not fully understood all of the concepts from the different programming languages, I am looking forward to making an impact in this course and the digital humanities from my previous experience in coding along with the new knowledge I will obtain from this course itself. I have got a good foundational understanding of HTML, and CSS and some basic of JavaScript, but I am hoping to further my knowledge of JavaScript in our course this term.