This is the first of five assignments in a semester-long CS-1-like course named Computing for Poets to introduce students to programming within one area of the digital humanities: the application of computing to the study of digitized texts. Here, students must build a small website with answers to two queries applied to and the results obtained from Google’s Ngram Viewer. The course leverages a MOOC for HTML/CSS/Javascript practice to maximize in-class, hands-on sessions. Students will return to HTML in the final assignment in this series when their Python scripts will produce web pages on the go.
Leverage online tutorials and practice sites; for example, I require that students complete at least the first four or five units of Codecademy's HTML/CSS course.
W3C's tutorials are also good, including exposure to and practice with W3C's Markup Validation Service to help students write HTML and CSS that follow the standards.
Achieving a comfort level with HTML, browsers, and servers is a serious gain for students in computing. Later, in the final assignment in this series, students return to HTML (5_Poets: Only in the Poetry) as they write Python scripts to output results as web pages.
Engaging students with meaningful content in interdisciplinary connections to compSci is made easy with Google’s Ngram Viewer: track word usage on the printed page over time. A rich commentary on the limitations of the tool helps students ask questions of their output, all the while learning how to make reasonable queries to a wonderfully powerful tool. In this assignment, students learn to build a small website with the added benefit of learning how to share their writing and analysis via a set of web pages.