Week 2: Computational Thinking

Response due Monday 1/27: “Hello World” (see moodle forum)

Tuesday, January 28: The command line

• Readings:
  • Meredith Broussard, “Hello, Reader”, and “Hello, World” from Artificial Unintelligence: how computers misunderstand the world (MIT: 2018). Broussard chapters on Moodle or access the book via Tripod
  • Jane Austen, “Lady Susan”, Letters I-XIV - read on Project Gutenberg
  • Command line workshop: read “Introduction to the Command Line” tutorial, through “Why is the command line Useful”
  • Watch: 1968 “Mother of All Demos” video (6 min.)
• In class:
  • Discussion
  • Command Line Workshop: “The Command Line” from Introduction to Cultural Analytics by Melanie Walsh.

Agenda

1. Warm-up: favorite game or puzzle?
2. Business: room change, readings, questionnaire, coding and troubleshooting, assignment
3. Readings: Broussard, Austen
4. Command line workshop
5. Markdown and GitHub overview

Thursday, January 30: Introduction to Python

• Readings:
  • Jane Austen, “Lady Susan”, Letters XV - XXX
  • A blog post on unicode/character encoding, either:
    • Kealan Parr, Unicode Characters - What Every Developer Should Know about Encoding
    • David C. Zentgraf, What every programmer absolutely, positively needs to know about encodings and character sets to work with text - stop at “Encodings and PHP”
  • Optional: practice command line
    • DSRI Tutorial
    • Terminus game
• In class:
  • Python workshop: “Programming in Python”, from Introduction to Cultural Analytics by Melanie Walsh

Agenda

1. Ice-breaker: what is bringing you delight?
2. Business & questions about project review assignment
3. Python workshop
   • “Python Basics”, Automate the Boring Stuff, ch. 1
   • “Programming in Python”, from Introduction to Cultural Analytics by Melanie Walsh

Project Review Assignment Due: Friday, January 31

Submit via Moodle