May 4, 2008

The Programming Historian is Now Available

by Cliopatria

The Programming Historian is now available on the NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment website. This work is an open-access introduction to programming in Python, aimed at working historians (and other humanists) with little previous experience.

Introductory lessons teach you how to

install Zotero, the Python programming language and other useful tools
read and write data files
save web pages and automatically extract information from them
count word frequencies
remove stop words
automatically refine searches
make n-gram dictionaries
create keyword-in-context (KWIC) displays
make tag clouds, and
harvest sets of hyperlinks

The Programming Historian is a work-in-progress. We are constantly adding new material, much of it driven by reader request. Upcoming topics will include indexing, scraping projects, simple spiders, mashups and much more.