This course introduces the Python programming language as a tool for reading and writing digital text. This course is specifically geared to serve as a general­purpose introduction to programming in Python, but will be of special interest to students interested in poetics, language, creative writing and text analysis. Weekly programming exercises work toward a midterm project and culminate in a final project. Poetics/text analysis topics covered include: character encodings (and other technical issues); cut­up and appropriated text; the algorithmic nature of poetic form (proposing poetic forms, generating text that conforms to poetic forms); transcoding/transcription (from/to text); n­gram analysis and Markov chain generation; performing digital writing. Programming topics covered include: data structures (lists, sets, dictionaries); strategies for making code reusable (functions and modules); functional programming (list comprehensions, recursion); getting data from the web; simple web applications; and parsing data formats (e.g., markup languages). Prerequisites:
Introduction to Computational Media or equivalent programming experience.

By Allison Parrish