Welcome to Programming for Humanists!

Hosted by the Center of Digital Humanities Research at Texas A&M University

Programming4Humanists provides courses designed to introduce participants to methodologies, coding, and programming languages associated with the Digital Humanities. We focus on creation, editing, and searchability of digital archives, but also introduce students to data mining and statistical analysis.  

What does the Center do?

Our forte at Texas A&M University (TAMU) is Optical Character Recognition of early modern texts, a skill we learned in completing the Early Modern OCR Project, or eMOP. Another strength that the Center of Digital Humanities Research (CoDHR) (http://codhr.tamu.edu) at TAMU brings to this set of courses is the Texas A&M University Press book series called Coding for Humanists. We use draft and final versions of these books, as well as many additional resources available on companion web pages, for participants in the workshop. The books in this series are of course upon publication available to anyone, along with the companion sites, whether the person has participated in the workshop or not. However, joining the Programming4Humanists (P4H) course enables participants to communicate with the authors of these books for the sake of asking questions and indeed, through their questioning, helping us to improve the books and web materials. Our goal is to help people learn Digital Humanities methods and techniques.

How can I participate?

Those who should attend include faculty, staff, librarians, undergraduates, and graduate students, anyone interested in acquiring skills for work in digital humanities and cultural analytics. Generally, the Fall semester of P4H is for anyone interested in making archival and cultural materials available to a wide audience while encoding them digitally according to best practices, standards that will allow them to submit their digital editions for peer review by organizations such as the MLA Committee for Scholarly Edition and NINES / 18thConnect. Participants will learn to code documents and manipulate them. The Spring semester is more advanced, presenting methods for data mining. Participants will learn a programming language in order to perform textual analysis on largely unstructured documents.

For more information, visit Registration.