Python Programming for the Humanities: An interactive tutorial | Hacker News Reader

Python Programming for the Humanities: An interactive tutorial

fbkarsdorp.github.io

81 pointsdanso13 comments

This reminds me of a project I started as a Religious Studies undergrad to try to use Python for scriptural analysis by analyzing word frequency. I abandoned it, however, after I tried running my program on several different translations (i.e. KJV, NRSV, etc.) and would get wildly different results. I realized that I couldn't rely on translations for accuracy and, being an undergrad, had no knowledge of Greek or Hebrew to be able to rewrite the program for the respective original languages.

It bummed me that I abandoned it, largely because I think there's a void for CS-aided Humanities endeavors. I still consider myself a (mediocre) humanities academic, rather than a (horrible) CS/IT worker. I'm happy to see this article perhaps giving some hope to other majors that you don't need to go all-in on Comp-Sci to be able to use it.

I did something similar while working for the IT department at the University of Chicago -- we helped a humanities prof build what was essentially a plagiarism detector, with the twist that it was designed to be applied to "great texts" in order to examine plagiarism, which wasn't considered a bad thing back in the day.

Spoilers: Rousseau copied like 25% of most of his texts from earlier authors.

At the same job, I also helped some linguistics grad students use python to do something involving linguistics that I didn't completely understand. They were pleased as punch to be able to automate a tedious manual process, and expand their throughput to entire texts instead of a few sentences.

So there is a lot of potential for using code to help the humanities, but it takes active involvement from hackers who are willing to work with humanities folks. Props to NSIT at the U of C for attempting this.

It goes deeper: the greek texts are divergent as well.

The work you proposed, believe it or not, has been done by hand (though I'm sure it has been replaced by computers.) Concordances have been around since 1262, and the first (according to wikipedia) was an effort of 500 monks.

What's the formula for converting monks to cpu cycles?

It depends on the denomination of the CPU.

This was written as if it were an intro to Humanities applications of CS to a math/CS academic. Not the other way round... was that intended?

If the target audience for this is someone from the humanities field with little to no experience in programming languages and environments, the ramp in this tutorial is very steep.

I agree... I've had a lot of absolute beginners ask me to "teach them to code" and at with their experience level, installation instructions alone would be enough to scare them off for good.

It is definitely a step in the right direction. A friend of mine recently tried teaching Python to a class of Neurology students and found that the usual "find all prime numbers less than 100" approach did not work on them! They didn't have the same aptitude for numbers and maths as a CS, Maths or Physics students. The class found the whole exercise of programming complicated and stressful. The same course had earlier been offered to Physics students, who reported to have enjoyed it thoroughly. Given this, I think a text manipulation based tutorial can work better for students who need to learn programming and do not have good aptitude for math. Of course, some amount of math has to be picked up in order to become a competent programmer, but this exposure can come later for the not so math savvy students.

Like @pistle, I'm a little confused about the intent of this notebook. This doesn't seem super beginner friendly; if I was a complete beginner, especially someone with a strictly humanities background and no CS experience, I imagine I wouldn't be able to get past the first "quiz":

> In the code box below, write a simple program that calculates how many minutes there are in seven weeks.

How? We haven't talked about code at all yet! How do you expect me to know what Python looks like enough to write that program?

Am I totally missing the point of this notebook?

Wasn't interactive for me. I'm running Chrome on Linux Mint. I cannot type where it says "insert your code here"

It's interactive in the sense that if you download the notebooks you can work through them with a local Jupyter installation.

If this is intended for people new to Python, I expect they will also have no idea what IPython or Jupyter is; there should probably be a blurb at the top about how to use this notebook with a link to the appropriate "Here's how to install IPython" page.

What kinds of problems are academics in the humanities trying to solve computationally?

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