Kiera Obbard

From May 14th-17th, 2024, I attended the DH@Guelph Summer Workshops 2024. This year, I took the “Introduction to Python” course. Here’s some of what we learned.

Dr. Paul Barrett was our instructor. The first day, he taught us how to use Jupyter Notebooks (which I’d used once before), and gave us a basic introduction to Python. We began, like every good programming course, by printing “Hello world”.

Throughout the next four days, we learned a number of different skills to manipulate data in Python. These skills were specifically geared towards the kinds of academic questions often asked by humanities scholars.

We learned how to make Data Frames with Pandas, how to load songs into Python using the Genius API and perform sentiment analysis on the lyrics with Vader sentiment analysis, how to make network graphs and maps, and how to pull comments from a reddit thread using the Reddit API.

Because of some illness amongst the organizing group, I was also called on to lead the Friday showcase where each workshop group had a chance to share what they’d learned.

Recently, I used the skills I learned in the Python workshop to pull data I’m using for a co-written paper on social media commentary about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce (see example code below).

It was a very successful DH@Guelph workshop! I can’t wait to see what I’ll learn next year.