After only a couple weeks of this class, I already strongly believe that humanities students should learn at least the basics to coding and programming languages. In the past few years, technology has already gotten to the point where it plays such an important and crucial role in many people’s lives along with in most areas of study. I personally believe that in the coming years, it will be an even bigger part of everyone’s lives. I think that not only humanities students, but all students of this time should learn the basics of coding because if anything it at least gives them a better understanding of the current state of society and how the world that they are so involved in is working. By learning how to code, humanities students will also gain a deeper understanding of the systems that are shaping our society, which will allow them to critically analyze or contribute to the ever growing digital world. While some may argue that learning to code distracts from the traditional idea of the humanities by veering away from cultural analysis and historical inquiry, I think it allows students to analyze cultural and historical events in a completely new way that enhances the impact and relevance of the humanities in this digital era.
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.
Matthew Kirschenbaum
This quote from Matthew Kirschenbaum supports the idea that programming helps model reality, which aligns with the idea that humanities’ focus on interpreting the world (both past and present) and representing it in a way for everyone to understand. This quote implies that programming is just another tool to help humanities students interpret and express the world.
I personally only have a quite limited background in using Python from the one CS class I took at Carleton, but I do have a fair amount of experience using R from my statistics classes. I have used R many times to create many different types of models from different datasets to the point where I find using R quite easy and intuitive for many different models. After taking tutorials for this lab assignment on HTML and CSS, I found both of them to be quite confusing and far less intuitive purely due to not having enough experience and practice with these languages. I initially felt the same way about R, but after using it a lot I am fairly comfortable using R, so I know that after using HTML and CSS some more and gaining more experience, I will definitely find that they become more intuitive and easier to understand than they currently are.
My code:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Coding in the humanities</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>My first time ever using html</p>
<p>After a short tutorial, I already feel like I am getting the hang of the basics</p>
<p>I think all humanities students should get some experience coding and understand the basics of programming languages</p>
<style>
p {
color: White;
}
body{
font-size: 20px;
background-color: #000;
}
</body>
</html>2 thoughts on “Lab 2”
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I totally agree with your perspective on how programming changes the way we analyze cultural and historical events. After working on last Friday’s post, I’ve gained a whole new appreciation for data visualization websites and tools. There’s no doubt that they’re incredibly helpful in helping us understand culture and history. Plus, technology has such a profound impact on our society and culture today, which is another key reason why we need to learn programming. A lot of the ways information technology influences us aren’t always obvious. We need a deeper understanding of technology to understand the world around us.
I love the quote that you chose for this post I think that it encapsulates the point of your post perfectly. I find the fact that you find R so easy so interesting because I feel the same way about Assembly (one of the more hard to learn programming languages), I think that the more capable we are as a population the better we are able to understand where we come from and where we are going, which makes it so that we should strive to be capable in both humanities subjects and stem ones, much like your post implies.