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Introduction to the course and initial setup

Welcome to the Computational Background Skills class! We will use these markdown documents to give you links and other things that it would be difficult to copy by hand. You, the students, may use it to come back to what we learned and review if needed.

Agenda (90m session)

Introducing the lecturers

Team from the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ACDH-CH OEAW)

  • Massimiliano Carloni
  • Matej Ďurčo
  • Dimitra Grigoriou
  • Fritz Haak
  • Nina Rastinger
  • Birger Schacht
  • Katharina Wünsche

If you have any questions or need any help regarding the lecture, please reach out to the lecturers, via [email protected].

Aims and contents of the course

This course is intended to provide basic training in skills needed in further courses and in the Digital Humanities in general.

Main topics covered:

  • Use of command line
  • Introduction to regular expressions
  • Practical use of Git
  • Some notes on file formats
  • Minimal introduction to web technologies
  • Where to go for help and how to understand the answers
  • Broader DH context

The whole course is aimed to gain practical skills, accordingly the contents of each lesson is accompanied with practical exercises, which we will go through during the class.

Whole course contents is available on github

Grading & Attendance

Attendance in every lecture is required due to the PI type of block-course.

Regular attendance, following the practical exercise tasks during the lecture and active participation will lead to a final grade.

Required Setup and Tools

Getting to know your OS

Operating system is system software which manages computer hardware and software resources. It provides common services for computer programs and interfaces for humans to interact with.

Most common current OS's are:

  • Windows (Microsoft)
  • macOS (Apple)
  • Linux (Linux community, open-source)
  • Mobile: Android (Google, based on Linux kernel)
  • Mobile: iOS (Apple)

Introductory questions

  • What is the filesystem and how is it structured?
  • What are files?
  • What are directories/folders?
  • What are programs?
  • How to navigate in the filesystem?
  • Why are some files hidden?

Mac

  • / as the center of the filesystem universe (exception: Windows)

  • Finding the filesystem location of a file from the macOS Finder:

    • Drag the filename from a Finder window and drop it into a terminal window to paste the path to the file
    • View the filename by selecting the file and Cmd+i (get info)
    • Right-click on a file and hold Option: the contextual menu will show the command Copy {file_name} as Pathname, which you can paste somewhere
    • Select "View > Show Path Bar" from the Finder menu bar

  • Configuring your machine to show hidden files

    • macOS Sierra (10.12) and later versions: Open Finder and hit Cmd+Shift+. Do the same thing to turn off hidden files.
    • macOS El Capitan (10.11) and earlier versions: Open the command line and execute defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES (or NO); restart the Finder whenever you change this (right-click on the icon in the Dock and select "Relaunch").
    • Actually, not all hidden files show up. Starting with macOS 10.12 16A238m, .DS_Store (Desktop Services Store) files are not shown. They contain information about their containing folders, such as the position of icons or the background image, and comments to the files. We will see how to show them with the command line interface (next lesson).

  • Configuring your machine to show filename extensions

    • Open Finder and select Preferences, click “Advanced”, and check the box next to “Show all filename extensions”.

  • Launching a terminal

    • The Terminal.app that you will find in the Applications → Utilities folder. (Many Mac users prefer the free third-party https://www.iterm2.com/.)
    • For Ubuntu Desktop (Unity): you can hit Ctrl-Alt-T or you can type Terminal into the Search box.
    • You can also open the current directory location in the Terminal from the file explorer (Nautilus): just right-click on an empty space of the window and select "Open in Terminal".
    • Otherwise, you can click on the name of the active directory in the breadcrumb and click on "Open in Terminal".

Windows

  • Configuring your machine to show filename extensions
    <screenshot> In any File Explorer window, click on “View” tab, and then “Options” on the right to open the “Folder Options” window.
    • In the “View” tab, uncheck “Hide extensions for known file types” box.
  • Configuring your machine to show hidden files, and more
    <screenshot> In the same “Folder Options” window as before,
    • Check “Show hidden files, folders, and drives”.
      • NOTE: Protected operating system files will still stay hidden.
    • Also check “Display the full path in the title bar” (not essential, but recommended).
  • Launching a terminal
    • The Command Prompt cmd.exe <screenshot> is the native Windows console, which grew out of DOS. We will be using it in this session.
    • How to launch: from the Start menu type in “cmd”.
    • NOTE: For later sessions and the remainder of this course we will be using the bash shell instead, which you downloaded and installed as part of Git. This is the command line interface we use and recommend.

More questions

  • Case sensitive vs case preserving: Linux is case sensitive, meaning files with the same name but different capitalization are different files (e.g., finalpaper.txt is different than FinalPaper.txt). macOS and Windows are case preserving, but not case sensitive.
  • Spaces in a file and directory names. Why could these be problematic?
  • User-specific directories: where are your home directory, document folder, and desktop? What are their full file/directory paths?
  • Non-English OS’s may have translation/localization applied, but only on the GUI side! Why is this?