For anyone who took the Regular Expressions workshop, I’ve updated the workshop webpage with some new links and an edited and annotated transcript of everything I typed in that you saw up on the projector screen.  The transcript includes 215 lines of code that you can copy and paste into Python, along with 332 lines of annotation to explain what’s going on. There’s even a new section at the end that deals with printing out the word-frequency structure that we computed at the end of the workshop.

I also updated the example code, zombify.py and pitchfork_scraper.py, with extra annotations.

Thanks for such a great weekend of discussions and learning, and I hope some of you who were at my workshop get some use out of the updated materials.

If you’re interested in the Regular Expressions, Text Processing, and Web Scraping workshop on Friday, please make sure to bring a laptop and to have the following software on your computer:

• Python — if you have a Mac OS X or Linux machine, this is already installed.  If you run Windows, you may have to download it.
• A good text editor — on OS X, I like to use TextWrangler.  On Linux, nice options include kate, kedit, and gedit.  On Windows, Notepad++ is a popular favorite.
• Though not a core part of the workshop, we’ll also be talking about command-line tools like wget (which is installed by default on Linux, easy to build on Mac OS X, and even available for Windows).  If you’re running Windows, try downloading and installing the standalone Unix-like text-based environment Cygwin.  Regardless of your system, make sure you know how to bring up a command-line terminal.

Please also bring an idea for a web site or text corpus that you’d like to slice and dice.

Technological power is political power in the modern world.  Yet many activists, humanists, artists, and disenfranchised social groups not only don’t wield technological power, they feel alienated from it.  What can we do—as academics, researchers, and citizens—to close this gap?

I’d like to have a discussion regarding our concerns about social/political disenfranchisement and its relationship with deep technological/empirical ability, and to work as a group to develop strategies for outreach and education that bring more diverse voices into the technological discourse. Success stories are welcome; bring your teaching tools, URLs, and syllabi!