Drawing on the popular web-based programming lessons for historians, I organized and co-lead meet-ups for historians at the graduate level. We held monthly meet-ups in THINC Lab and went over a single Programming Historian lesson. Working in groups or pairs, the participants problem-solved and created together, and had myself or my co-leader, Adam Doan at the University of Guelph Library, to help troubleshoot.
These meet-ups turned out to be a good way of getting women invested in coding, as the first meet-up in Fall 2018 had 14 participants – all women. Over time we changed the way these workshops ran, and have learned many lessons about building community around code. Watch this space for future iterations of the Programming Historian Meet-ups!
* The Programming Historian is a series of publicly available lessons on everything from Python to Augmented Reality. Volunteers write these lessons and run the site and the lessons are slowly becoming available in languages other than English. The world of DH is better because of these lessons – you should check them out!