Looking for new ways to collect, analyze, and visualize humanities data? Try one or more of the workshops in our expanded Python for Humanists series! Designed to be taken as a sequence, these workshops will progress from introductory to more advanced techniques using the Python programming language. Each session will be grounded in data and research questions that are important in the humanities.

Workshops will be held over Zoom and are open to all Yale students, faculty, and staff, but space will be limited. Registration will open shortly, so check back soon for updates!

For tutorials from past Digital Humanities Lab workshops, visit the DHLab’s GitHub repository.

Python for Humanists Workshop Series

First Steps with Python
October 1, 3:00 p.m. Eastern

Curious about Python but not sure where to start? This workshop will introduce the basics of programming in Python. Participants will learn how to perform common tasks in Python in order to build familiarity with the language’s syntax and best practices.

Collecting Data with APIs
October 15, 3:00 p.m. Eastern

Learn how to retrieve online data via an Application Programming Interface (API). Many libraries, museums, and galleries worldwide are digitizing their collections and making them available for data mining via APIs. In this workshop, we’ll cover what APIs are, along with how and why you might use them.

Parsing Data with Python
October 22, 3:00 p.m. Eastern

Develop techniques for wrangling messy data with Python. Oftentimes, data retrieved online needs to be transformed or otherwise parsed before it can become usable for your research. In this workshop, we’ll walk through using Beautiful Soup, a Python library for extracting data from HTML and XML files

Getting Started with Networks
October 29, 3:00 p.m. Eastern

This workshop will provide a broad overview of network analysis. After covering what networks are and how to read them, instructors will open two breakout rooms: one will teach how to generate networks using Gephi (off-the-shelf software, no programming required) and the other will walk through using NetworkX (a Python library for creating networks). Participants will have the option to choose which breakout room they will join.

Building Classifiers with Python
November 5, 3:00 p.m. Eastern

This workshop will offer an introduction to classification techniques in machine learning. We will discuss some of the many use cases for classification techniques—including spam detection, named entity recognition, and plagiarism detection—as well as the mechanics behind popular classification algorithms. Finally, we will build our own classifier and will classify observations in a prepared dataset that will be provided to participants.

Extracting Color with Python
December 3, 3:00 p.m. Eastern

Many programming workshops focus on how you can use Python for text analysis, but in fact, it is also useful for studying images at scale. In this workshop, we’ll demonstrate how we can use Python to extract color palettes from a collection of images. Along with discussing popular technical approaches, we will also introduce color spaces and theories of color perception, which will affect what algorithms we choose for specific tasks.

Identifying Similar Images with Python
December 10, 3:00 p.m. Eastern

This workshop will focus on the task of identifying similar images at scale, but we will also discuss how you can apply same techniques when working with texts as well. We will cover the process of converting cultural heritage materials into “vectors”, the basics of working with vector spaces, and the ways we can use vector spaces to identify similar images and texts.