Course Syllabus

Help! I’m a Humanist! - Humanities Programming with Python

This course introduces participants to humanities programming through the use of Python for data acquisition, cleaning, and analysis. The course assumes no prior technical knowledge and will focus on accomplishing basic research tasks. Students should walk away feeling equipped to tackle a variety of typical problems that arise for digital humanists.

We will discuss programming and debugging concepts through the design, implementation, and presentation of small projects working with humanities data. Primary technologies and topics covered in this course will include the command line, Git, GitHub, and Python; working with data sources such as API’s, CSV files, and data scraped from the web; and basic text analysis. Over the course of the week, we will work with data from DPLA and Project Gutenberg. If the words above mean nothing to you, don’t panic—this course is for you

Day One: Basics

  • Introduction
  • Introducing the Command line
  • HTML and CSS basics
  • Introduction to git
  • Introduction to Github
  • Deploying simple pages

Day Three: Python in Practice

  • Working with CSV
  • Getting data from API's
  • Intro to Web Scraping

Day Four: Python in Practice 2

  • Visualizing and Basic Text Analysis

Archived Syllabi