Instructor : Maneesha Sane
Date and Time: Thursday, February 19th and Friday, February 20th, 2026 / 1:00pm - 4:00pm ET
ONLINE
Workshop fee : $50 VRA members/ $65 non-VRA members
Registration capped at 20
Registration opens in 2026
WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION
If you are doing things like supporting Digital Humanities faculty, working with students analyzing and visualizing data, developing your own data project, processing metadata about your collections, or building web displays for digital assets, Python may be worth exploring. Many of us rely on existing tools such as Gephi, Omeka, or Scalar to come up with project solutions. But, sometimes the tools that already exist do not fit the needs of the research or project. Sometimes you need to make your own tool. Python is a flexible, cross-platform, modular, object-oriented programming language used for a variety of basic and high-level computing projects. It is great for back-end web development, data analysis, database management, scientific and humanities computing, and has an active, friendly user community. Even if you don't plan on becoming a programmer yourself, knowledge of coding helps you to talk to, or translate between, scholars, students, administrators and programmers.
This introductory Python workshop is designed for beginners with no prior programming experience. Learners will learn concepts such as variables, loops, conditionals, and functions. This will be an interactive workshop with practical and hands-on exercises using real life data sets. By the end of the workshop, learners will be able to write simple Python scripts and will have built a foundation to continue learning.
As the emphasis is on building foundational skills through direct practice, AI tools are not appropriate for this workshop and will not be used.
No prior programming knowledge is needed.
Participants will be asked to provide their own laptop and have the software already installed. (Instructions will be provided to registered attendees prior to the workshop.)
Instructor bio:
Maneesha Sane is a programmer, database developer, and educator. Her academic and professional background is in education, community development, and software programming. She is experienced in teaching and managing educational programs for all ages in K-12 schools, community, academic, government, and corporate settings, virtually and in-person. She is a self-taught programmer with experience in Python, R, SQL, Git, and more. She currently works with The Carpentries, a project which teaches foundational coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide. She is also a co organizer of the Philadelphia Python Users Group.