To accompany next week’s readings on the long histories of DH and Humanities Computing, in this week’s workshop you’ll work with a technology that’s been around since the 1970s.

You will follow this slideshow tutorial to explore text analysis using the Unix Command Line, or Unix Shell.

I first created this tutorial for Carnegie Mellon’s 2019 DH Literacy Workshop, and I’ve since adapted and reused it in my undergraduate courses. While performing this exercise, you might think about the place of “technical” tutorials as part of your own future DH pedagogy. What do students get out of this assignment? What are they learning about computers, about text, about what’s possible? If you were to use something like this in your class, what would you hope students would come away with?

You should also think about this tutorial in the context of our readings. To what extent does command line text processing constitute a “deformance,” in McGann’s formulation? How does CLI fit into the long history of Humanities Computing laid out by Hockey? What does it mean to use a computer interface based on text rather than icons?

We’re concentrating on text in this workshop, but the possibilities of DH on the command line don’t end with text analysis. ImageMagick is just one example of how much you can do with CLI.

Complete by Thurs. 1 October

Remember, these workshops are designed to take up about an hour of your time (making up the third hour of our seminar). If you find that a workshop is taking a lot longer than that, it’s okay to stop and reach out to me about it.