Notice: Thanks to Wilko Graf von Hardenberg of Università degli Studi di Trento in Italy, the Programming Historian, 1st ed. is now available as a PDF for download.

The Programming Historian is an open-access introduction to programming in Python, aimed at working historians (and other humanists) with little previous experience. There are two editions available here; the second is currently under development. We are constantly adding new material, much of it driven by reader request. We welcome questions, corrections and suggestions for improvement. At this point we are still figuring out how best to allow community participation, while maintaining the coherence and direction of a more monographic work. If you e-mail us at wturkel@uwo.ca, acrymbl@uwo.ca and/or amaceach@uwo.ca, we are happy to respond to you personally and try to incorporate your comments. In the future we may come up with something more elegant... but, hey, it's a work in progress.

• William J. Turkel, Adam Crymble and Alan MacEachern, The Programming Historian, 2nd ed. NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment (2009-).
• William J. Turkel and Alan MacEachern, The Programming Historian, 1st ed. NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment (2007-08).

Introductory lessons teach you how to

• install Zotero, the Python programming language and other useful tools
• read and write data files
• save web pages and automatically extract information from them
• count word frequencies
• remove stop words
• automatically refine searches
• make n-gram dictionaries
• create keyword-in-context (KWIC) displays
• make tag clouds, and
• harvest sets of hyperlinks