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.

Tags: browser | digital history | open access | open source | programming | Python | Zotero