Programming for Text Analysis

3 units

This course will introduce basic programming and text-analysis techniques to humanities students. Beginning with an introduction to programming using the Python programming language, the course will discuss the core concepts required for working with text corpora. We will cover the basics of acquiring data from the web, string manipulation, regular expressions, and the use of programming libraries for text analysis. Later in the course, students will be introduced to larger text corpora. They will learn to calculate simple corpus statistics as well as techniques such as tokenization, chunking, extraction of thematically significant words, stylometrics and authorship attribution. We will end with a brief survey of more advanced text-classification terminology and topics from natural language processing such as stemming, lemmatization, named-entity recognition, and part-of-speech tagging.