Computer science and humanities fundamentally come from different perspectives. Humanities is a field with no clear answers – every thesis written, every opinion, and every documented history is the result of opinions and ideas being condensed down to the clearest perspective. The Romans may have lived as such, and the author may have intended this. Contrarily, computer science is a field of one-answer problems. Programming is a language designed around complete precision – the only interpretation that matters is that of the compiler, and no matter who writes and who reads it, the code will always have the same answer. Because of this, I think it is incredibly important that every humanities student learn to program, and every computer science student learn the humanities. Not as a necessary tool for interacting with the world, but as a method for mutual understanding of the two fields – where one excels and the other falls short, how they can best communicate, and how approaching a problem from one field or the other shapes our views on it.
Procedural literacy, which starts with exercises like making a snowball, will be essential if humanities students are to understand virtual worlds as rhetorical and ideological spaces, just as film and the novel are likewise understood as forms of representation and rhetoric.
Hello worlds (why humanities students should learn to program). (2010, May 23). https://mkirschenbaum.wordpress.com/2010/05/23/hello-worlds/
Programming and the virtual space are here to stay. It makes sense that humanities students would develop the tools they need to engage with not only the layers of the space presented to them, but also the underlying programming and ideas that go into their creation.
I have pretty extensive background in programming, though exclusively in C# and python as tools for making games. I’ve never interacted with HTML or CSS before, so these tutorials were an interesting experience. Learning how to connect CSS to HTML and add more detailed styling will certainly be useful in the future.
Below is a sample of the code I’ve made for the tutorials:
<html>
<head>
<title>Tutorial for Code</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>
Hello World!
</h1>
<h2>
Slightly smaller hello world
</h2>
<p>
<strong>This</strong> is a bad website made in HTML.
</p>
<p>
<i>Testing Types of italics and stuff are cool.</i>
</p>
</body>
</html>1 thought on “Lab 2 – Web Dev Fundamentals – Jane Parson”
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I really like your approach to the guiding question of humanities and programming. There does seem to be a fundamental difference between the problem-solving perspectives of the two fields, so I agree that it’s important for members of each one to learn about the other. I also like the idea that this goes both ways: computer science students should learn to think like humanities students because there is great value from both of these approaches.