My understanding and experience with python were completely nonexistent until the last couple of labs we had in class. Once I got the hang of saving them and running the codes it started to work a little bit better for me, and by the second lab, I was a lot more comfortable with the lessons. I worked through most of The Programming Historian lessons (1-14), but I did not get to the Jupyter Notebooks sections.
I found the HTML lessons particularly interesting, and seeing how it could open up an internet tab was very cool. As well, applying it to the Old Bailey was even more interesting because it was showing a database that I have used before and it is a database that would be of interest to many historians. So, applying Python to something like the Old Bailey in the lessons makes it easier to see how this could be used in other types of research. In the beginning lessons, I was wondering how this could be applied to research as it seemed very complicated, but when we started using the Old Bailey it started to make more sense how it could be used.
Being able to break down a webpage through Python makes it a lot easier to look for specific words and be able to count those words in a matter of seconds. If a historian wanted to know how many times “theft” or “guilty” got brought up throughout a certain time period being able to use resources such s Python would save so much time and could be more accurate. For example, when reading through many court documents it might be easier for your eye to skip certain words you’re looking for, however, Python would pick up all the words. In addition, The Old Bailey Online is one of the best-transcribed databases out there and it was transcribed by hand and so the number of errors in it is very minimal. This is significant because, in other databases, computers might pick up false negatives or positives. If in certain primary documents a word is spelled differently when you input that word into Python, it might not pick up the misspelled word.
Despite knowing (somewhat) how Python works I am not overly confident in my own abilities to start a project that involves Python. It was easy to follow the lessons as it was step-by-step what to do. However, coming up with that on my own seems overwhelming and I would definitely need to learn more about the different codes and how they work to be able to do a project like that. I think it is important to have a basic understanding of what Python is, at least to be able to talk intelligently to other historians and possibly computer scientists about the project. It is nice to know that this is a possibility, if I ever do a big project that this would be helpful for, it is nice to know there is an easier way to input thousands of data points instead of doing them all individually by hand. A big part of a historian’s job is to interpret sources, whether those are primary written documents, works of art, buildings, etc., information is not just given to us. So, I think it would have been helpful to have included an analysis of the Old Bailey court case and how a historian would have used the information from Python and interpreted it.
