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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 lecturer

Tara L. Andrews (tara.andrews@univie.ac.at)

Please don't hesitate to reach out if you need any help about the lecture.

Aims and contents of the course

This course is intended to provide basic training and support for further skills courses in the Digital Humanities. It is strongly recommended as a prerequisite to the other DH practical courses. As such, students will be required to bring a laptop computer (no tablets!) If this presents a problem, please contact one of the course instructors in advance.

We will also try to accompany the contents of each course with some practical steps of the exercise, which will lead to a final project in the end.

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 count toward your final grade.

Required Setup and Tools

Create a personal GitHub account if you don't already have one: https://github.com/join

We will do the installation in small groups of 3 or 4. As you run through each installer, read the information you are being given and discuss among yourselves what you think it means! The object is to recognise what you don't understand, and notice the choices that the installer makes by "default" on your behalf.

  • Get the practice data from here: http://swcarpentry.github.io/shell-novice/data/data-shell.zip and unzip it. We strongly recommend that you unzip it on your Desktop.
  • Download and install the Atom code editor: https://atom.io/
  • (WINDOWS ONLY) Download and install Git SCM (including Git Bash): https://gitforwindows.org/. The installer will ask you a lot of questions! For most of these, it is fine to accept the default, and it is just as fine not to have any idea what these questions are talking about. There is only one place you need to pay attention: when you are asked what Git's default editor should be, choose Atom.
  • (MAC ONLY) Run the command xcode-select --install to install Git and some other useful command line utilities. You are strongly advised to make Atom Git's default editor; after Git is installed, you can do this with the command git config --global core.editor "atom --wait".

Getting to know your OS

Operating systems are system software which manage computer hardware and software resources. They provide common services for computer programs and interfaces for humans to interact with.

Operating System

The most common current operating systems are:
Windows (Microsoft)
macOS (Apple)
Linux (Linux community, open-source: RedHat, Ubuntu, Debian, etc.)
Mobile: Android (Google, based on the Linux kernel)
Mobile: iOS (Apple)

File system hierarchy

  • What are files?
  • What are directories/folders?
  • What are programs?
  • GUI file explorers and file hierarchy

About files

  • Why are some files hidden?
  • 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). Mac OS and Windows are case preserving, but not case sensitive.
  • Spaces in a file and directory names. Why could these be problematic?

Navigating your filesystem

Please follow along in the separate guides for Mac and Windows.

Next session

After the lunch break we will run parallel sessions for Mac and Windows users. Please make sure you are in the appropriate group!