How this project began.

Dr. William Mattingly started PythonHumanities.com in 2018 while researching Carolingian exegesis and medieval commentary networks — work that led him to programming almost by accident.

Around 2015 there were few places to turn if you were a humanist who wanted to learn Python. Most tutorials assumed a computer-science foundation, and most digital humanities resources skipped past the language itself. He began writing down what he wished someone had written for him: lessons that treat programming as a craft you can pick up without first spending a semester on algorithms.

Today the site hosts a full introductory course, four free textbooks (on Python, Named Entity Recognition, spaCy, and BookNLP), and a growing set of video playlists. It's used by humanists, sociologists, data scientists, and a long tail of researchers in more than fifty countries.

Learning philosophy

You learn to program by programming. Mattingly's own first social-network analysis script took a month of trial and error — and that month, he argues, is the whole point. The lessons here are built around small, specific problems: read a text file, search an Excel workbook, scrape a page of HTML. Each one is short enough to finish in a sitting and concrete enough to remember.

Who it's for

People in the position Mattingly was in around 2015: you have a project in mind, you suspect Python would help, and you don't want to sit through a generic "learn to code" course to find out. If that's you, the Python for DH course is the best starting point; the textbooks go deeper on specific tools.

Support the project

Everything here is and will remain free. If you'd like to support the work, the best ways are to subscribe on YouTube, become a Patreon member, or share a lesson with someone it might help. Donations go toward audio and video equipment and server costs for hosting the textbooks.

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Questions, tutorial requests, or a project you'd like to share? Reach out on Twitter.