ANU Digital Humanities Python Programming Introductory Workshop Information

23 March 2026 14 min read

The Python Programming Introductory Workshop launched by the Australian National University (ANU) Digital Humanities program in 2023 has become a signature course for technical literacy training in the humanities and social sciences at the university. The workshop was designed jointly by the ANU College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHL) and the School of Computing to provide humanities students without a computing background with programming training from the ground up. According to the ANU official course catalogue (2024), the workshop runs 8 sessions per semester, 3 hours each, reaching around 320 students a year. In the 2024 QS World University Rankings by Subject, ANU’s arts and humanities disciplines ranked 18th globally, and its digital humanities direction was described by Times Higher Education (2024) as “one of the most interdisciplinary integrated programs in the Asia-Pacific region”. Demand for programming skills in digital humanities is now growing rapidly — Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS, 2023) data shows that over the past five years, the number of job advertisements in humanities fields requiring “Python” or “data analysis” skills grew by 142%, which makes this workshop especially timely.

Workshop Background and Course Positioning

The Python Programming Introductory Workshop is the hands-on practical component attached to “Digital Humanities Methods and Practice” (DIGH2001), a compulsory course in the ANU Digital Humanities program. The course was designed under the leadership of the Director of the Digital Humanities Centre, Dr. Katherine Bode, and was first offered in Semester 1, 2023. The workshop’s target audience is clear: undergraduates in the humanities and social sciences, with no prior programming knowledge required. The ANU official syllabus (2024) states that the workshop aims to “enable students to conduct text analysis, data visualisation and corpus construction using Python”, rather than to train professional software engineers.

The workshop is scheduled in weeks 2 to 9 of each semester in the ANU academic calendar, once a week, running in parallel with the theory course. Teaching takes place in the computer laboratory of the Haynes Building on ANU’s main campus. According to the ANU Student Experience Survey (2023), 87% of students who took the workshop reported that their “programming anxiety decreased significantly”, and 76% could independently complete a basic text analysis project by the end of the semester.

Course Content and Teaching Modules

The workshop content is organised into 6 core modules, each spanning 2 to 3 sessions. Module 1, “Python Basics”, covers variables, data types and conditional statements; Module 2, “Data Structures”, focuses on the use of lists, dictionaries and tuples with humanities data; Module 3, “File Operations”, teaches how to read and write primary sources in .txt and .csv formats; Module 4, “Text Processing”, uses the nltk and spaCy libraries for tokenisation, part-of-speech tagging and frequency counting; Module 5, “Data Visualisation”, generates word clouds and line charts with matplotlib and seaborn; and Module 6, “Project Practice”, requires students to select data from ANU digital humanities databases (such as the Trove newspaper corpus) and complete a small analysis.

Teaching Staff and Learning Support

The workshop is run by two Tutors, both doctoral students at the ANU School of Computing, with at least one of them having a humanities background. Each class is capped at 20 students to ensure one-on-one guidance. A report from the ANU Centre for Teaching Development (2024) shows that the workshop’s staff-to-student ratio (1:10) is significantly better than the ANU average for computing courses (1:25). The workshop also offers after-class online Q&A sessions (2 hours per week) and detailed teaching notes (in Jupyter Notebook format), with all materials distributed through ANU’s Wattle learning management system.

Workshop Schedule and Registration Process

The workshop occupies a fixed time window in the ANU academic calendar. In each academic year, registration for Semester 1 usually opens in week 3 of February, with the first class starting in week 1 of March; registration for Semester 2 opens in week 3 of July, with classes starting in week 1 of August. Exact dates are published each year by the ANU Academic Registrar in November of the preceding year.

Registration is done through ANU’s ISIS system. Digital Humanities students can simply tick “DIGH2001 Workshop Component” on the course enrolment screen; students from other programs must first apply for “cross-disciplinary elective permission”, which is approved by the CHL Student Affairs Office and usually takes 3 to 5 working days. The ANU International Student Office (2024) reminds international students holding a Student visa (Subclass 500) to make sure the workshop does not clash with other compulsory courses; otherwise they must submit a “course timetable conflict waiver application”.

Prerequisites and Alternative Options

The workshop has no formal prerequisites, but students are advised to take “Introduction to Digital Humanities” (DIGH1001) at the same time to gain theoretical background. For students who cannot attend the in-person workshop, ANU offers an asynchronous online version with recorded videos and self-test exercises, but no live tutoring. The online version is capped at 50 enrolments; 43 students actually enrolled in Semester 2, 2023. Data from the ANU Examinations Office (2023) shows that in-person workshop students scored higher on the average final project (78.2/100) than online students (71.5/100), and the difference is statistically significant (p<0.05).

The Workshop’s Impact on Academic and Career Development

The workshop has had a measurable impact on students’ academic output and career competitiveness. The ANU Digital Humanities Centre (2024) tracked 160 graduates of the two 2023 workshop cohorts and found that 23 of them (14.4%) submitted workshop project outcomes to undergraduate research journals (such as the ANU Humanities Review) within the following year, and 11 presented at the ANU Annual Undergraduate Research Conference.

In terms of career development, a report from the ANU Careers Service (2024) notes that students who completed the workshop received interview invitations at a rate 31 percentage points higher than non-participants when applying for roles such as “digital curator” and “cultural heritage data analyst”. The Australian Research Council (ARC, 2023), in its Assessment of Digital Humanities Skills Demand, specifically noted that humanities graduates with a Python foundation see a 27% improvement in employment success at “GLAM institutions” (galleries, libraries, archives and museums). For cross-border tuition payments, some study-abroad families use dedicated channels such as Flywire Tuition Payments to complete the remittance, ensuring fees arrive in time before registration.

Industry Recognition and Articulation Courses

The workshop itself does not award a standalone certificate, but students who complete all 6 modules and pass the final project receive a “Digital Humanities Practice - Python Module” notation on their transcript. This notation is recognised by the Australian Digital Humanities Association (ADHO, 2024) as “proof of foundational digital literacy”. In addition, about 60% of the workshop content overlaps with the first 4 weeks of “Python Programming Basics” (COMP1730) offered by the ANU School of Computing, giving students a smooth pathway into more advanced programming courses. Data from the ANU Admissions Office (2024) shows that 17 workshop students went on to take COMP1730 in 2023, and 14 of them earned “High Distinction” or “Distinction” grades — well above the course’s average pass rate (68%).

Common Issues and Technical Support

During the workshop, students may run into technical environment configuration issues. ANU Information Technology Services (ITS) provides pre-configured virtual machines (VMs) containing Python 3.11, Jupyter Notebook and all required libraries, which students can access directly over the ANU network. 2023 statistics show that 92% of technical issues were resolved within 24 hours through the ITS ticketing system. For students using their own devices, the first week of the workshop includes a 30-minute “environment setup session” that walks through installing the Anaconda distribution. The ANU Digital Humanities Centre (2024) recommends that Windows users use a WSL 2 environment and macOS users install via Homebrew to avoid path conflicts.

Accessibility and Inclusive Support

The workshop follows ANU’s inclusive teaching policy. For students with visual impairments, all teaching materials are provided in screen-reader-compatible versions (HTML rather than PDF); students with learning difficulties can apply for an additional 50% of assignment submission time. The ANU Accessibility Service Centre (2024) reports that the workshop received 4 reasonable adjustment applications in 2023, all of which were approved. The workshop classroom is equipped with height-adjustable desks and chairs and noise-cancelling headphones to accommodate neurodivergent students.

Workshop Assessment and Feedback Mechanisms

The workshop assessment consists of formative assessment and summative assessment. Formative assessment counts for 40% of the final grade and includes weekly programming exercises (8 in total, 5% each) and one mid-term quiz (10%). Summative assessment counts for 60% and takes the form of a final project: students must select at least 10 texts from the ANU digital humanities corpus, complete topic modelling or sentiment analysis with Python, and submit a 1,500-word analysis report. Data from the ANU Grading Committee (2024) shows that workshop students averaged 74.6 points (standard deviation 12.3) in 2023, higher than the DIGH2001 theory course average (68.2 points).

Student Feedback and Course Iteration

The ANU Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ, 2023) collected 128 valid responses. 85.2% of students felt the workshop was “clearly organised”, 79.7% felt the “pace of teaching was appropriate”, and 91.4% felt the “tutor support was excellent”. The most common suggestions for improvement were “add more humanities case studies” (mentioned by 34%) and “extend after-class Q&A hours” (mentioned by 22%). In response, the workshop introduced 4 new case modules in Semester 1, 2024, covering 19th-century Australian fiction, parliamentary debate records, transcriptions of Indigenous oral histories and social media text analysis. The ANU Centre for Teaching Innovation (2024) included this iteration in its annual report as a case of “evidence-based course improvement”.

FAQ

Q1: Is the Python Programming Introductory Workshop open to students outside the Digital Humanities program?

Yes. The workshop is open to all ANU undergraduates, but registration priority is: Digital Humanities students > College of Humanities and Social Sciences students > students from other colleges. Data from Semester 2, 2023 shows that non-Digital Humanities students made up 34% of participants, with the largest numbers coming from linguistics, history and archaeology. When registering, students need to select the “DIGH2001 Workshop Only” option in the ISIS system and pay a 0-credit fee (included in the course package). The ANU Admissions Office (2024) confirms that the workshop carries no additional charge and is already covered by standard tuition fees.

Q2: What certificate or credit can I earn after completing the workshop?

The workshop itself does not award standalone credit, but as part of DIGH2001, completers receive a “Python Module Completed” notation on their transcript. The ANU Interdisciplinary Research Centre (2024) recognises this notation as a “digital literacy micro-credential”, equivalent to 0.5 ANU credits (recognised only when applying for the Digital Humanities minor). For students who want formal Python certification, the ANU School of Computing offers COMP1730 (6 credits), and completing the workshop exempts them from its first 4 weeks of content, saving about 40 hours of study time.

Q3: Can I keep up with the workshop without any programming background?

Yes. The workshop is designed specifically for complete beginners. A 2023 survey showed that 94% of participants had never touched Python before, and 12% had no concept of programming at all. Week 1 includes a dedicated 90-minute “Introduction to Programming Thinking” session covering the basic concepts of variables, loops and functions. Follow-up data from the ANU Centre for Teaching Development (2024) shows that students with no prior background averaged 72.1 points on the final project — only 4.7 points lower than students with some background (76.8 points), and the difference is not statistically significant (p>0.05).

References

ANU Academic Registrar. 2024. Digital Humanities Course Catalogue and Syllabus.
Times Higher Education. 2024. World University Rankings by Subject: Arts and Humanities.
Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). 2023. Labour Market Skills Demand Trends Report.
Australian Research Council (ARC). 2023. Assessment of Digital Humanities Skills Demand.
UNILINK Education. 2024. Database of Digital Humanities Courses at Australian Universities.