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The Programming Historian 2: Installing QGIS 2.0 and Adding Layers

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In this lesson you will install QGIS software, download geospatial files like shapefiles and GeoTIFFs, and create a map out of a number of vector and raster layers. Quantum or QGIS is an open source alternative to the industry leader, ArcGIS from ESRI. QGIS is multiplatform, which means it runs on Windows, Macs, and Linux and it has many of the functions most commonly used by historians. ArcGIS is prohibitively expensive and only runs on Windows (though software can be purchased to allow it to run on Mac). However, many universities have site licenses, meaning students and employees have access to free copies of the software (try contacting your map librarian, computer services, or the geography department). QGIS is ideal for those without access to a free copy of Arc and it is also a good option for learning basic GIS skills and deciding if you want to install a copy of ArcGIS on your machine. Moreover, any work you do in QGIS can be exported to ArcGIS at a later date if you decide to upgrade. The authors tend to use both and are happy to run QGIS on Mac and Linux computers for basic tasks, but still return to ArcGIS for more advanced work. In many cases it is not lack of functions, but stability issues that bring us back to ArcGIS. For those who are learning Python with the Programming Historian, you will be glad to know that both QGIS and ArcGIS use Python as their main scripting language.

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration

Authors: Niche Canada, Roy Rosenzweig

The Programming Historian 2: Introduction to Google Maps and Google Earth

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Google Maps and Google Earth provide an easy way to start creating digital maps. With a Google Account you can create and edit personal maps by clicking on My Places. In the new Google Maps interface, click on the gear menu [icon] at the upper right of the menu bar, and select My Places. The new (as of summer 2013) interface provides a new way of creating custom maps: Google Maps Engine Lite allows users to import and add data onto the map to visualize trends.

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration

Authors: Niche Canada, Roy Rosenzweig

The Programming Historian 2: Output Data as an HTML File

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This lesson takes the frequency pairs created in Counting Frequencies and outputs them to an HTML file. Here you will learn how to output data as an HTML file using Python. You will also learn about string formatting. The final result is an HTML file that shows the keywords found in the original source in order of descending frequency, along with the number of times that each keyword appears.

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration

Author: William J. Turkel and Adam Crymble

The Programming Historian 2: Creating and Viewing HTML Files with Python

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This lesson uses Python to create and view an HTML file. If you write programs that output HTML, you can use any browser to look at your results. This is especially convenient if your program is automatically creating hyperlinks or graphic entities like charts and diagrams. Here you will learn how to create HTML files with Python scripts, and how to use Python to automatically open an HTML file in Firefox.

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration

Author: William J. Turkel and Adam Crymble

The Programming Historian 2: From HTML to List of Words (part 1)

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In this two-part lesson, we will build on what you’ve learned about Working with Webpages, learning how to remove the HTML markup from the webpage of Benjamin Bowsey’s 1780 criminal trial transcript. We will achieve this by using a variety of string operators, string methods and close reading skills. We introduce looping and branching so that programs can repeat tasks and test for certain conditions, making it possible to separate the content from the HTML tags. Finally, we convert content from a long string to a list of words that can later be sorted, indexed, and counted.

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration

Author: William J. Turkel and Adam Crymble

The Programming Historian 2: Code Reuse and Modularity

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Computer programs can become long, unwieldy and confusing without special mechanisms for managing complexity. This lesson will show you how to reuse parts of your code by writing Functions and break your programs into Modules, in order to keep everything concise and easier to debug. Being able to remove a single dysfunctional module can save time and effort.

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration

Author: William J. Turkel and Adam Crymble

The Programming Historian 2: Working with Text Files

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In this lesson you will learn how to manipulate text files using Python. This includes opening, closing, reading from, and writing to .txt files. The next few lessons will involve downloading a web page from the Internet and reorganizing the contents into useful chunks of information. You will be doing most of your work using Python code written and executed in Komodo Edit.

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration

Author: William J. Turkel and Adam Crymble

The Programming Historian 2: Counting Frequencies

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Your list is now clean enough that you can begin analyzing its contents in meaningful ways. Counting the frequency of specific words in the list can provide illustrative data. Python has an easy way to count frequencies, but it requires the use of a new type of variable: the dictionary. Before you begin working with a dictionary, consider the processes used to calculate frequencies in a list.

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration

Author: William J. Turkel and Adam Crymble

The Programming Historian 2: Python Introduction and Installation

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This first lesson in our section on dealing with Online Sources is designed to get you and your computer set up to start programming. We will focus on installing the relevant software – all free and reputable – and finally we will help you to get your toes wet with some simple programming that provides immediate results. In this opening module you will install the Python programming language, the Beautiful Soup HTML/XML parser, and a text editor. Screencaps provided here come from Komodo Edit, but you can use any text editor capable of working with Python. Here’s a list of other options: Python Editors. Once everything is installed, you will write your first programs, “Hello World” in Python and HTML.

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration

Author: William J. Turkel and Adam Crymble

The Programming Historian 2: Python Introduction and Installation

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Downloading a single record from a website is easy, but downloading many records at a time – an increasingly frequent need for a historian – is much more efficient using a programming language such as Python. In this lesson, we will write a program that will download a series of records from the Old Bailey Online using custom search criteria, and save them to a directory on our computer. This process involves interpreting and manipulating URL Query Strings. In this case, the tutorial will seek to download sources that contain references to people of African descent that were published in the Old Bailey Proceedings between 1700 and 1750.

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration

Author: Adam Crymble

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