The only other time I’d experienced coding was in a select few QGIS tutorials. The code included in one tutorial was something I actually saved in a document for future use. It would automatically set the colour of polygon border lines to 30% darker than the fill colour. This was a nifty little string of code that I could copy and paste into QGIS and it would save me a few button clicks and the burden of deciding what shade of grey would look best. This small yet useful bit of code fits in nicely to the theme of the past few weeks: you don’t have to go on to be a professional coder to get something out of coding.
What did I learn?
Following the tutorials of the past two weeks went well enough. I made it to the end of Lesson 7 and focused on reading for comprehension and typing the code myself. It does help to do this while learning, even if your intent is to just copy and paste everything in the future. I found that I was able to remember the really important aspects of coding, like how rogue spaces or quotation marks can yield a Fancy Error. I’m confident I’ve forgotten every single term except string but that’s because it’s, well, the word string. I don’t think I remember what a string really is (so much for reading for comprehension). But, for the purposes of my future coding, I don’t have to know the terms.
If you want a simple tip on checking if you’re understanding a concept, try changing something simple in the code. Maybe add an additional Print function with a message not used in the tutorial.
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How can coding help me, personally?
I see myself using small bits of coding here and there to help me in repetitive or arduous tasks. I was genuinely intrigued by the idea of using code to scrape data from multiple site pages at once, saving a researcher potentially hours of manual work. I have no interest in writing programs, but I have a lot of interest in saving myself time. I’d be curious to see this specific coding in action, but that will need to wait until after the term is done. I do intend to follow through with this tutorial and practice using this skillset myself. Other helpful things I’d be curious to look into include:
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- Backing up documents automatically.
- Can coding write my essays for me? Asking for a friend…
- Clearing out old data on my computer to help it run faster. Like a really thorough cleaning.
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How can coding help historians, generally?
Learning how to communicate with computer scientists is, in my opinion, a benefit of learning at least a bit of code. Speaking the same language helps. But I want to focus on one other benefit that isn’t saving us time or talking to programmers, it’s problem solving.
This blog post points out that one of the benefits of learning to code is learning how to think. Problem solving is a vital skillset, regardless of the context. As we saw in essentially every article from last week (Porter et al. and Trading Consequences, specifically), problem-solving is essential when working with digital tools. Text mining millions of scanned then OCR’d pages of books and newspapers presented a plethora of challenges. Tables in the text caused issues, certain letter conventions led to spelling errors (I’m looking at you, f), and Italy, Texas caused a few problems. Knowing how to think, how to problem solve, and how to even define your problem to begin with are all skills that you practice with coding. I really appreciated that in this tutorial they focused on how to write out and define a problem first, then how to solve it. Just writing out your issue in simple words can help problem solve in almost any scenario.
The Hurdles
The barriers I foresee with learning additional basic coding is what words to use when Googling how to fix something. This was an issue I encountered when learning QGIS. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, so searching for answers was tricky. Having a mentor with experience was what helped me help myself, something that I think tutorials can, partly, accommodate for. Tutorials are nice because they keep things clear, easy to understand, and generally build off previous lessons. There seems to be an abundance of free resources online for learning, which is great. The Programming Historian is a great place to start for humanities relevant tutorials.
Some other resources include Stack Overflow and Learning with O’Reilly, which we should have access to through the U of S. The Stack Overflow site is basically a forum for coders where you can have your questions answered and get ideas. A historian that’s looking for a copy and paste solution to a simple problem could look here to Frankenstein code together. O’Reilly is a bit more of a formal education resource to teach you coding.
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Is it worth it?
Based on my experience of the last two weeks, historians can absolutely benefit from a basic understanding of coding. I’d make that argument based on “Scraping Multiple Websites” alone, but the fact that we can learn help ourselves speed up research, to communicate with programmers better, and practice problem solving skills, shows that there are tangible benefits.
