what	where	when	who
DH Core Skills and Foundations	NYU Bobst Library, Room 619	May 29th 2015, 9:30am--4pm	Dennis Tenen (Columbia)

In this workshop we will cover the foundations of critical computing practice in the humanities. We'll begin with the basics of files and operating systems, plain text and binary formats, plain text, markdown, and rudimentary text analysis using native command line tools.

About me

Visit in person at Columbia English or xpmethod.plaintext.in. Follow on @dennistenen and star/watch the repos on GitHub (upper right).

What to do to prepare?

Install the following:

• plain text editor
• Pandoc
• Git
• Babun (Windows only)
• Latex (BasicTeX for Mac, MiKTeX for Windows, TeX Live for Linux)
• Zotero

Create an account on:

• GitHub

Don't worry if you cannot get something to install properly. We will set some time aside to help each other get started.

Philosophy*

^{* for {critical | minimal | empowered | humanities} computing, inspired by Ken Thompson and Doug McIlroy}

• No black boxes!
• Use few, small, simple, universal, and powerful tools that you can hack and understand.
• Wherever possible store data in human-readable text streams.
• Do it right. Doing it badly accumulates intellectual, technological, and ethical debt.
• If you have to do something more than once a hundred times,^† automate.
• Divide big problems into small, modular components.
• Bootstrap and time well spent.^‡
• Keep poking, get help, take notes, comment, annotate, share, remix, and train others.

_{† Because you need to understand what you are automating, well.
‡ This means investing time into skills that scale with your experience and lead to more advanced applications.}

DH Cornerstones

Asterisk indicates topics covered today.

• OS & command line*
• Plain Text (Markdown + Pandoc)*
• Version control (Git + GitHub)*
• Content management (Jekyll or Wordpress)
• Networking
• System administration (AWS + Linux)
• Programming language (Python)
• Project management
• Stats + algorithms (for data science)

Schedule

time	topic
9:30am -- 11:30am	os & command line basics
12:00pm -- 1:00pm	catered lunch
1:00pm -- 2:00 pm	pandoc + markdown
2:00pm -- 4:00 pm	Git + GitHub
flex (time permitting)	advanced CLI

Resources

• StackOverflow
• Unix for Poets
• Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text using Pandoc and Markdown
• DH Notes
• Pro Git Book
• The Linux Command Line
• Bash Programming
• Data Science at the Command Line
• Package Control for Sublime
• Oh My Zsh