I believe that humanities students should NOT have to learn to code in the sense that Kirschenbaum proposes but rather, as Donahue suggest, that they see coding as an approachable and specialized tool that can do a number of things to apply to and boster the work they do in the humanities.

“The concerns of the computer sciences and the concerns of the humanities are literally one and the same. Programming languages, math and algorithms are the discourses used by computer scientists to address their concerns just as psycho analysis, ethnography and material culture are some of the discourses used to address the concerns of the humanities.” -Evan Donahue

This perspective serves the idea that coding isn’t necessary for interacting with and using the computer sciences or even understanding how it might be used for an interdisciplinary project. 

Even the idea of “learning to code” involves so many different coding languages; requiring this as a baseline instruction would be an overwhelming and non-specific task. I have a little bit of coding experience with Python from taking Intro to Computer Science but no experience with HTML or CSS so all of this was new to me. I think the tutorials went well, they were straightforward enough and built on the same project for every new chapter which I appreciated. I certainly don’t feel like an expert but the tutorials do give me the sense that I could read the code and understand what it is doing, which is the first step in code literacy.

Here’s a bit of the code that I was able to write after the tutorials. This code was first given to me by the tutorials, then I copied it and altered the contents with the understanding of how each piece was working together. This level of literacy is certainly enough for a humanities student to make some really interesting stuff. For that reason I don’t think students should feel like they need to know every coding language or even everything about one coding language. Having a rudimentary understanding of one language already opens up possibilities for collaboration between the humanities and computer science.

My First Web Page

Maddietopia

welcome to my domain

here is a list

• tomatoes
  1. cherry
  2. roma
• arugula
• butter

<h1>My First Web Page</h1>
<h2>Maddietopia</h2>
<p>welcome to my domain</p>
<h2>here is a list</h2>
<ul>
    <li>tomatoes
        <ol>
            <li>cherry</li>
            <li>roma</li>
        </ol>
    <li>arugula</li>
    <li>butter</li>
</ul>