Showing posts with label Victorian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Victorian. Show all posts

Group Project: Sentiment Analysis of Poetry in Python (DHSI 2016)

I took a one-week course on Coding Fundamentals at DHSI 2016 with Dennis Tenen (Columbia University) and John Simpson (University of Alberta). You can see the syllabus for the course here

Let me start with a quick plug for Dennis Tenen's group at Columbia, the "Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities"  You can see some of the projects they are doing at their Github site; one in particular that seems really interesting is RikersBot, a Twitter bot that conveys a series of statements from inmates at Rikers Island Prison in New York. It was created as a joint project between Columbia University students and Rikers inmates interested in learning coding; part of the project involved teaching all of the young people in the class the coding they would need to build a Twitter bot. The Bot is currently not active, but the stream it produced over several months is well worth a look.

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Why coding? I wanted to get started with coding because it seems to be one of the major dividing lines between people who can chart their own independent course through the digital humanities and people who work with ideas and tools developed by others. It's not the be-all, end-all, of course (as I've said before, you can do so much now with off-the-shelf tools), but some experience with coding seems like it could be really helpful for projects that don't quite fit the mold of what's come before.

The class itself was intense, frustrating, and sometimes really fun. I'm not going to lie: learning how to code is hard. I can't say that I will readily be able to start spitting out Python scripts after four days of working with the language, but I might at least be able to figure out how to a) do some simple scripts to process batches of text files that otherwise require repetitive, laborious work, and b) use libraries of code developed by others in Python to do more advanced things.

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