Hacking the Humanities is a summer coding course I run each May in the School of English at the University of Kent. Over four weeks, undergraduate students in the Humanities get up to speed in Python. We begin in Week 1 with basic structures of the Python programming langauge, spend Weeks 2 and Week 3 doing some digital close reading, and then spend Week 4 learning how to calculate Burrows' Delta and perform some authorship attribution.
For students at Kent, I offer a series of video lectures and practical workshops to support the course, but I make all the programming assignments free for use here on Github. The programming assignments are designed for self-study, you should be able to use them without too much trouble.
The easiest way to access these materials is using Google Colab. This way you access the materials through your browser, and you won't have to install any sofware.
Use the links below to open the student version of each Notebook in Colab. These versions have blank spaces in the 'Assignment' sections for you to write and test your own code:
- Welcome
- Week 1: First Steps in Python
- Week 2: Analysing Text
- Week 3: Analysing Corpora
- Week 4: Authorship Attribution
If you are stuck, or you are a teacher and wish to use the materials, then you can access versions with all the solutions, and also with the hidden tests visible using the below links:
- Welcome (with solutions)
- Week 1: First Steps in Python (with solutions)
- Week 2: Analysing Text (with solutions)
- Week 3: Analysing Corpora (with solutions)
- Week 4: Authorship Attribution (with solutions)
I use nbgrader to generate the student versions and to mark students work. If you try to replicate this workflow for your own class, you will see that I have modified the outputted 'student' versions in various ways, normally to try and make the task more straightforward for beginning coders.
I hope you find these resources useful. Happy coding!