Lab 2

But what about the student of contemporary literature interested in, say, electronic poetry or the art of the novel in the information age? Or the student interested in computer-assisted text analysis, who may need to create specialized programs that don’t yet exist? For these students, I believe proficiency in a computer language can fulfill many of the same functions — accessibility, self-reliance, heightened critical awareness — as knowledge of a traditional foreign language.

Matthew Kirschenbaum

Most of his argument and writing looked at the similarities between the humanities, especially English, and programming as opposed to explicitly talking about why people should learn to program. Still, I thought this quote came the closest to talking about why students of the humanities should also learn it. Like the humanities, it is a mode of creation and expression and for some, they might have projects they would like to bring to life that require the knowledge. I agree, that people, even if not majoring or working in CS, should learn how to program so they have the option if the need or want arises. Even if it is not required, or if this aspect of the work can be passed off to another person, it is always more helpful to know something than to be left in the dark.

That being said, I am a humanities major and I find programming/ coding to be extremely difficult. I have tried in the past but every time I start to work on something I find myself overloaded with the new information, not really understanding it, and often getting headaches from looking at it for long periods of time. It’s a frustrating experience. There are things I want to do but find myself unable to do. My past experiences in high school also make me not want to reach out to others for help. There was one class for it in my high school, which I joined later on, and the other students had been there for two or three years and had experience from middle school and home. I felt scared most of the time in that class. I feel scared most of the time in this class too; I don’t want to be seen. Sometimes I feel dread even just opening my computer. But I have things I need and want to do so I ignore it.

body {
font-size: 20px;
color: maroon;
background-color: gray;
font-family: helvetica;
text-align: center;
border-style: solid;
border-width: 8px;
border-color: black;
}

I don’t have a code sample to illustrate my points well since I really don’t know how to code, but this is part of what I did for the homework/lab. Knowing how to code could be useful for freelance artists creating a webpage to display their work. I didn’t know browsers could pull up web pages from text files and that web pages could be created that way. I think understanding things like in the tutorials would be helpful for web design, even if people aren’t building them from text files like that.