Writing/Code

Today in the #lafdh workshop we had folks working together to write original functions in Python. Ryan introduced six basic methods that are built into Python that are very useful for text processing:

• print - print a text string or the value of a variable
• lower - return a string in all lower case
• len - get the length of a string
• split - turn a string into a list, broken (by default) on white spaces
• join - turn a list into a string
• type - get the data type of the selected object (usually the value of a variable)

and with these, plus what we learned about variables yesterday, folks wrote functions to do cool things like

• find out how many sentences are in the novel Moby Dick (or any other text)
• turn a plain text passage into a list of comma separated values (.csv) so it can be opened in Excel
• randomly switch words in a passage around, making "word salad"

The goal was to build on our work yesterday, gain confidence and experience working with a programming language, and to use computational thinking to understand how we Humanists and computers, though we see texts differently, might do some cool things together.

There were high-fives and cheers before lunch as code snippets executed without errors. And after lunch, there was a triumphant show-and-tell in which our merry band became real programmers by showing off their code and hearing from other programmers how they would have done it differently. :)

We also did some work in the afternoon building a topic model using gensim. Using libraries, moving into an IDE (from iPython notebooks) and working out i/o workflow were the real objectives in that introduction, but we did get to see and discuss the results of an LDA topic model. Real DH stuff after just two days!