To Code Or Not To Code?

I personally believe that it’s very important for humanities students to learn coding for various reasons including but not limited to improving their work in the digital world, which will benefit the DH community greatly. In fact, Kirschenbaum states “Computers should not be black boxes but rather understood as engines for creating powerful and persuasive models of the world around us.” If humanities students learn the coding that is fundamental to building and designing web pages, they will be able to digitize their work on the internet and present it in a creative way to the public.  This is an effective way to promote work in the humanities, where people will be engaged with the digital work and learn greatly from it.

My first experience with coding started when I decided to learn HTML by myself in High School. I remember using wix.com and Weebly to make a website for a school project. Then I wanted to learn how to make a website from scratch and decided to find some online tutorials to learn the basics of HTML. Soon, I was able to make a basic webpage with some details on it. I realized I need to learn CSS to make the webpage look better. I was able to change the background color, edit the font size, family, and color which made the quality of the webpage better. However, I didn’t proceed to Javascript because it seemed more difficult and I was already busy with finishing assignments for my high school classes. I noticed that Weebly takes much less time for me to create a website for my school projects, so I shifted gears and continued using Weebly. In addition, I was able to make the website look much more professional with the tools that were available to me in Weebly and the ease of using them made me prefer Weebly over building a website from scratch using HTML and CSS.  However, I am eager to learn more about HTML, CSS, and Javascript so I can bring all the changes that I want when building a website. 

Code Sample

<h1> I am in favor of coding! </h1>