I thought I would share the notes I took this morning during Jadrian Miles’ excellent workshop Regular Expressions, Text Processing, and Web Scraping. The notes include the a key to general RE commands, annotations on lines from the python scripts we used in the workshop (available here: cs.brown.edu/~jadrian/thatcamp/), and annotated versions of some of the regular expressions we entered directly into the command line. There are also links to the RE tutorials Jadrian recommended.

Hopefully these will be a useful reference to others who attended the workshop, and maybe even peak the interest of those who weren’t there!

Regular Expressions Notes

Coming from a school that is fairly traditional when it comes to scholarly work, some of our faculty express interest in DH projects but often do not end up pursuing these projects or work on them as side projects in addition to the traditional scholarship they must do for appointment and merit-based review. Generally it seems as though the departments are not opposed to DH projects, they simply won’t evaluate them during reviews because they don’t consider them comparable to publications or don’t know how to evaluate them. I think it would be valuable to have a conversation about how to approach DH projects in this type of environment, specifically:

• Balancing DH projects with other scholarly work,
• Approaches to gaining department support of DH projects,
• Best practices in evaluating DH projects during the review process.

It might also be useful to discuss how IT and library staff can help to facilitate this process.