I don’t necessarily agree with Matthew Kirschenbaum’s viewpoint in his essay “Hello Worlds (why humanities students should learn to program).” While I do believe allowing humanities students the opportunity to learn to code will allow for the humanities to move in a more digital space, I feel forcing humanities students to code as a prerequisite is unnecessary. Some humanities students such as those wanting to make blogs or move into the digital world will see the most benefit from taking classes in coding, however, those who are more inclined toward literary analysis, philosophy, or art may not necessarily need to learn programming languages for their work. Moreover, it’s essential to remember the words of Donahue, who noted that “learning to program should be no more and no less enabling than reading Derrida.” In other words, learning to program should be seen as a way to engage with a specific discourse within computer science just as reading Derrida is seen as a way to engage with a specific discourse within the humanities.
Something I learned through HTML Dog is about selectors, properties and values in CSS. The following shows an example of the values being applied to the font-size and color properties to the body selector:
body {
font-size: 12px;
color: white;
}
While this piece of code may be important if I want to start web developing, a humanities student with no interest in web development shouldn’t need to know this knowledge as a precondition for their focus of study. By not forcing humanities students to learn code, the humanities will maintain a diverse multidisciplinary field.
As for my previous experience with coding, I have taken a few courses in both high school and college because I am interested in learning about the field of computer science. I’m definitely not an expert by any means and have never learned HTML or CSS before so that was new for me. I felt the HTML Dog tutorials went well with a few hiccups along the way. For me, it was easiest to learn through the jsBin tutorial we did in class over the HTML Dog tutorials because I was able to see the output right away.
