Programming for Humanities and Social Sciences

COURSE OBJECTIVE
Goals of this course:

• Get to know the basics of the Python programming language
• Become an independent programmer, who is able to find solutions to new problems

Skills you will acquire during this course:

• Learn how to deal with unstructured and structured data
• Learn how to extract relevant statistics from large amounts of data 
• Learn how to share your code and results

COURSE CONTENT
As many humanities researchers use textual resources as their primary object of inquiry, you learn how to analyze the growing amount of digital text using the Python programming language. No programming knowledge is required; we believe that anyone can learn how to program.

You will learn how to extract information from text corpora; deal with different file types (plain text, CSV, JSON); deal with large amounts of data; and visualize and share your results. We will focus on readability and understandability of your code, so that you will be able to share it with others, and reuse your code in the future.

This is a practical course, in which you will get a lot of hands-on experience. Due to the nature of this course, active participation is required.

TEACHING METHODS
Interactive practical sessions.
Although parts of the lectures will be about programming and language processing theory, the focus is on having interactive and practical sessions. Students are expected to actively participate and ask questions.

TYPE OF ASSESSMENT
Bi-weekly assignments (60%): The assignments are designed to practice your programming and problem solving skills. Moreover, they allow us to keep track of your progress, and identify topics that require more attention in class.

Midterm exam (40%): The midterm exam is designed to test your knowledge of Python. To pass this course, you need a passing grade (at least 5.5) on the midterm.