Strings, lists, conditional execution, for-loops

This series of workshops introduces participants to basic coding in the programming language Python with the specific goal of enabling them to process, manipulate, and analyze digitized language data. Students will acquire an understanding of fundamental Python data structures, methods, and operations as well as specific applications designed for machine-based text analysis. Among the tasks students will learn to handle are the following:

• Searching text for individual words and comparing words in context across different texts
• Counting words, multi-word sequences, parts-of-speech, etc.
• Calculating frequency distributions of all words in a text or corpus
• Reading from and writing to external files (e.g. reading corpus material into Python and writing results of a search query to a spreadsheet)
• Searching for complex patterns in natural language by means of regular expressions.

Given the current pandemic situation and attendant uncertainties, the workshops will be conducted via BigBlueButton. Please contact the instructor to receive links to the meeting room and the repository with course materials.

The individual sessions build on each other and are intended as a complete series. Take-home exercises will be given in between sessions to practice the acquired skills. However, it is possible to participate in only some of the workshops, according to participants’ availability. In this case, it is expected that the content of previous workshops (provided asynchronously) will have been thoroughly reviewed and the exercises completed. Submission of the relevant exercises will be a precondition for joining a workshop session.