I obviously support all people learning about what they’re passionate about, so words like “should” and “shouldn’t” don’t really have a place in this discussion. However, I do see the value of humanities students learning to code. The push for it is based on the recognition that our world is unavoidably digital, and the more we reckon with that, the better and more modern our projects will be. The combination of humanistic research and digital presentation opens the door to a great many opportunities, and the more humanists who know how to code, the more of those types of projects we can have. All that said, as between the two positions we read about, I find Donahue’s explicit and pragmatic points more compelling.
“Thus, students should learn to program, but they should not let their inability to program prevent them from engaging with the computer sciences.”
Evan Donahue, https://web.archive.org/web/20220516075231/https://www.hastac.org/blogs/evan-donahue/2010/05/28/hello-world-apart-why-humanities-students-should-not-learn-program
Donahue’s central argument is that coding is a wonderful tool for the humanities, but it is not the end all be all. He agrees that combining technology and humanism is a great idea, but he’s wary of an emphasis on coding pushing away potential collaborators, and I find that idea very reasonable. The point of the Digital Humanities discipline is collaboration and the fact that programming is uninteresting or too daunting for some humanists doesn’t mean those people shouldn’t be invited to the table.
As for me, I had next to no coding experience prior to this class. When I was much younger, I had a brief stint in Python. Armed with a child’s guidebook and a 2010 MacBook (with an exploded battery, mind you), I spent maybe a couple weeks poking at the programming language. I find it worthwhile to be able to communicate with and manipulate computers, but I don’t have much experience doing so. The HTML Dog tutorials went well for me though, likely because they’re direct and detailed. I did the HTML and CSS beginner tutorials, a little too unconfident for JavaScript quite yet. Like much of the rest of the class, I couldn’t get the output display to work properly (either because of TextEdit or Chrome), but the .html file looks right… I did learn to
change text color
andemphasize
which is pretty cool to see. There’s a sample of my very basic .html file below, hopefully showcasing a “before picture” as compared to an “after picture” later in the term. We shall see.<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>This is my THIRD web page</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css">
</head>
<body>
<h1>Heading! (Big)</h1>
<h2>Smaller heading?</h2>
<p>This is the body</p>
<p>How <em>exciting</em></p>
<h2>Next:</h2>
<p>Let’s try a<br>
line break</p>
<h2>Lists</h2>
<h3>Unordered</h3>
<ul>
<li>Item 1</li>
<li>Item 2 is a list within a list</li>
<ul>
<li>Very meta</li>
<li>Item2.2</li>
<li>Item 3</li>
</ul>
<h3>Ordered</h3>
<ol>
<li>So this is first</li>
<li>And this is second</li>
<li>Which makes this third</li>
</ol>
</body>
</html>
1 thought on “Lab 2 – Basic Web Dev (Arlo Cornell)”
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Hello! I also was briefly into coding as a child. I think it’s always interesting to hear about people’s experiences with stuff like that as kids, so it’s cool that you were into Python! From what I’ve seen of the other lab posts, that seems to be some other people’s first experiences with coding as well. For some reason I was into HTML first instead, so I know nothing about Python or Java/etc.