In general, I agree with the Kirschenbaum essay that humanities students should learn to read and write code, but my primary reason for this is that, beyond just humanities students, I think that everyone with the resources to do so should, at the very least, be able to understand code or how a program functions.
Of course, I agree with Kirschenbaum about the great usefulness of computer programs in the field of humanities projects and humanities research. Databases, models, and video games are very powerful tools for education, experimentation, and creation in the humanities. I’m particularly interested in the creative applications that Kirschenbaum discusses, which seem often unconsidered in other discussions of Digital Humanities.
More significantly, many of us in the humanities miss the extent to which programming is a creative and generative activity.
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Hello Worlds (why humanities students should learn to program).
But, beyond the academics and students, an ability to program (or at least understand how a program functions) is an essential skill for any citizen to have in a world increasingly reliant on computer programs. Programming, in many ways, is becoming a practical skill for any person to have, just as being able to change the lightbulbs in your home or understand a news article would be.
For the Web Development part of the Lab assignment, I chose to complete the Intermediate HTML and Beginner JavaScript tutorials, because, while I have some amount of self-taught HTML/CSS experience, I had very little JavaScript experience.
Because I am mostly self-taught in HTML and CSS, some aspects of the HTML tutorial were very familiar to me, while others were entirely new. All of my self-taught experience was through building a personal website (hosted through Neocities), which was essentially entirely a combination of searching how to do small pieces of code using W3schools and pure trial-and-error. This made me pretty familiar with the parts of HTML and CSS that were relevant to whatever I wanted to work on and entirely unfamiliar with parts that had never occurred to me to use. Overall, I thought the Intermediate HTML tutorial was helpful, because I did learn some new things, but I’m also still confused on how some tags like <article> and <section> would be more useful than just a <div>.
When I started the Beginner JavaScript tutorial, I was a little bit surprised. While I thought I had absolutely 0 experience using JavaScript, apparently I must have learned the basics and then forgot that I ever did, because a lot of it looked somewhat familiar. However, because I was only vaguely familiar, starting with a beginner tutorial was super helpful to re-learn the basics. I definitely liked working with JavaScript, and will probably use it more in the future now that it’s more understandable to me.
<table>
<tr>
<th style="text-align:center">things i learned in Intermediate HTML</th>
<th style="text-align:center">things i learned in Beginner JavaScript</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:center">the <span> tag</td>
<td style="text-align:center">using the console part of browser dev tools</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:center">meta tags</td>
<td style="text-align:center">objects and properties</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:center">how to merge cells in a table</td>
<td style="text-align:center">arrays
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="2" style="text-align:center">more coding!</td>
</tr>
</table>| things i learned in Intermediate HTML | things i learned in Beginner JavaScript |
|---|---|
| the tag | using the console part of browser dev tools |
| meta tags | objects and properties |
| how to merge cells in a table | arrays |
| more coding! | |
