I just put together a research and teaching portfolio! Warning, it’s a .pdf file.

Photo by mbrochh

Welcome to a new year at Python for Humanists! I’d like to use this post to point out a few things that commenters have shown me since I last posted. John Case wrote a very good rejoinder to a few of the ideas I presented in my last post, saying “[a]s a developer, I’d like to say, generally, if extra lines of code makes it easier to understand how the code works, use the extra lines of code! It’s incredibly frustrating to try to reverse-engineer someone else’s code because they were trying to be too clever and would end up with some abomination that’s impossible to debug or modify.” John makes a great point. The whole point of Python is to create code that others can easily use. And sometimes being too simple can end up making your code more difficult to read. So, while simple is generally better than complex, don’t create code that others cannot read or understand.

Second, David Haeselin recommended MIT’s OpenCourseWare’s Intro to Computer Science class, which he says “teaches Python.” Here’s the first lecture on beginning to understand computational concepts lead by Eric Grimson and John Guttag. The beginning of the video discusses the logistics of the class, and the discussion of computation begins around 16:19.

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I can’t help but admire my colleague Miriam Posner. As voices go back and forth after #aha2012 and #mla12 about whether DH is too utopian, not critical enough, not oppositional enough, too postmodern, too meta, too religious, etc. etc. etc.,* Miriam offers a wonderfully concise and powerful account of why the digital humanities inspires those who practice it. In a response to Andrew Hartman’s claim that THATCamp, and DH in general, suffer from an unwarranted utopianism, Miriam writes:

Hartman enjoyed himself but wondered if the scholars attending THATCamp evinced an unwarranted utopianism about the prospects of technology to transform the practice of history. It’s a good question, and an understandable reaction, but I don’t think it’s altogether accurate. First, I think that what Hartman understood as utopianism may in fact have been an attempt by the participants to make newcomers like Hartman feel welcome. If there’s a utopianism present at THATCamp, I think it’s more about the possibilities of new forms of interacting with each other, not the technology itself.

Miriam later argues that “history has a humility that I love,” and indeed Miriam’s dedication to humility is part of the reason why I’ve learned so much from her. From her reflections on project management to sharing her research tools and thinking about academic accessibility for people with disabilities, Miriam has shown me the power of valuing different contributions and approaching academic work with humility.

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Here’s a storify of the tweets and pictures taken at Kathi Inman Berens’s and Brian Croxall’s The “Building Digital Humanities in the Undergraduate Classroom” roundtable and Kathy Harris’s “Digital Pedagogy” roundtable at #MLA12.

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Welcome to the third installment of my Python series! Last time we detailed the IDLE interface and talked about a few of the principles of the Python language through the “Zen of Python” by Tim Peters. This time, we’ll look at a few more lines of the Python philosophy. Here are two great guides through the Zen of Python that I use in this post!

3. Simple is better than complex
Python is structured to be simple and explicit. If you can program a simple line of code, it is much better than a complex one. This is one reason why you’ll see Python coders constantly finding ways to simplify their code. One quote that is often attributed to this philosophy is by Chris Connell: “Junior programmers create simple solutions for simple problems. Senior programmers create complex solutions to complex problems. Great programmers find simple solutions to complex problems.” For example, when you want to swap values between two variables in JavaScript, you have to:

var a = 5, b = 9;
b -= a; // a = 5, b = 4
a += b; // a = 9, b = 4
b = a - b; // a = 9, b = 5

By contrast, with Python, all you have to do is define the variables - then:

b, a = a, b

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