In high-school, I was involved with the robotics program. While being involved, I was coding movements and actions for the robots to do. This is the most coding I have ever done. This was all done through statements called “If this, then that.” These commands are what creates a code and can help generate the algorithms or patters that we are trying to achieve. In class, our professor showed us the website IFTTT which is a service that connects your product with the ability to connect and interact with other services. A prime example is when you go on a news website and at the bottom it says “Share this on Facebook.” This means that the website and Facebook will work together to share the post. The program would be programmed as “If shared then will post on Facebook.” The next service we talked about was Monkeys Writing Shakespeare. This was fun because we got to pull up the code and insert our own words that we wanted to see appear on our generated text. This was a great excursive to do because we got to see the code interact with a webpage via internet.

Building this is hard to do because it requires previous knowledge and frameworks to build on. While breaking things, you can just paste in words or commands and see what happens through trial and error. I am definitely someone who likes to tinker and mess with things so I am a breaker! I learned a lot through these excesses and mainly what I am happy to share is that you dont have to be an expert coder or a computer science major to understand code, all you need is patience and time to understand the patterns and formulas written in the code. With that being said, I think you dont have to be a coder to understand or be involved in the digital humanities space. In the end of the day, Digital Humanities is about building up our resources and new ways to access our information and new ways of innovating or breaking previous systems.