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Overview

In this class, you will learn to code. As a result, you will be finally be able to implement that app idea, convince your uncle that grad school was a good idea, and retire to a private island with a robot butler you build yourself that doesn’t cache all your drink orders into a cloud registry.

… Not really. (That’s a three-semester project, at least). But you will learn to program. The reason to learn to code in a humanities class is twofold.

One is that you have some project you want to do, and coding will help you do it. Computers are dumb, but fast. If you want to download thousands of books, count millions of words, categorize hundreds of pictures, you’d be foolish not to use code to do it.

Another is that you don’t have a project yet, but would like to work one out.

This course is part of a triptych offered in the NYU digital humanities program. The other two introduce working with data and web development.

We use the python language, but self consciously make forays into understand general principles of programming.