Programming from A to Z, Fall 2016

This course focuses on programming strategies and techniques behind procedural analysis and generation of text-based data. We'll explore topics ranging from evaluating text according to its statistical properties to the automated production of text with probabilistic methods to text visualization. Students will learn server-side and client-side JavaScript programming and develop projects that can be shared and interacted with online. There will be weekly homework assignments as well as a final project.

Info

• Daniel Shiffman, Tuesdays, 9:00am-11:30am
• All class dates
• Office Hours
• In addition to the ITP physical class, I am running an online version of the class for Patreon subscribers. ITP students will receive a slack invite should they want to participate. YouTube live stream sessions TBA.

Mailing List

• Join ITP A2Z Google Group. This is for the ITP physical class only.
• Contact me for an invite to the online slack channel.

Week 1 - Intro

• Notes and Examples
• Git, Github, Github pages
• DOM manipulation in p5.js
• Strings in JS
• Text input (from user, from file)
• Client-side vs. Server-side programming
• Homework Assignment

Week 2 -- Regular Expressions

• Notes and Examples
• Also
  • multiple DOMs + multiple event
  • rita.js -- similar and rhyming, etc.
• Regular Expressions
  • meta-characters
    • position
    • single character
    • quantifiers
    • character classes
    • alternation
    • capturing groups and back reference
  • Regex in atom editor
  • Regex in JS:
    • Regex: test(), exec()
    • String: match()
  • Splitting with regex: split()
  • Replace with regex: replace()
  • randexp.js
• Homework Assignment

Week 3 -- Data/API Workshop

• Notes and Examples
• JSON basics
  • Corpora maintained by tinysubversions
• JavaScript libraries
  • rita.js
  • nlp-compromise
• Getting data from APIs
  • wordnik
  • nytimes api
  • wikipedia api
• Working with google sheets: tabletop.js
• machine learning as service: clarafai
• Homework Assignment

Week 4 -- Intro to Node and Twitter Bots

• Notes on Node
• Notes on Twitter Bots
• Notes on deploy to heroku
• Notes on deploy to amazon ec2
• How to make a Twitter bot
• Start working on Twitter Bot project
• Homework Assignment

Week 5 - Text Analysis Workshop

• Notes on text analysis
• In class, we'll build a simple concordance together as well as demonstrate and discuss TF/IDF and Bayesian analysis.
• Simple Concordance
• TF/IDF
• Bayesian Analysis
• Node text analysis packages

Week 6 - Show Twitter Bots

Week 7 - Text Generation: N-Grams and Markov chains

• Notes on N-Grams and Markov Chains
• What is an N-Gram?
• What is Markov Chain?
  • order
  • source text and output design
  • char vs. word n-grams
  • client-side vs. server-side generation
• Homework Assignment

Week 8 - Text Generation: Grammars

• Notes on Context-Free Grammar
• Tracery by Kate Compton
• Context free grammars
• Homework Assignment

Week 9 - Building your own API in Node

• Notes on API in Node
• Notes on Firebase
• Express
  • serving files
• data persistence
  • local json files, databases?
  • Firebase
• html scraping, request package
• routes
  • query string vs. "RESTian"
  • CORS
  • sending back JSON
• Text APIs
  • Your own API (concordance, markov, etc.)
  • AFINN-111 sentiment analysis (sentiment node package)
  • spellcheck (with node natural)
  • Bayesian text classification (with node natural)

Week 10 - Chrome Extensions

• Notes on chrome extensions

Week 11 - Final Project Proposals part 1

• Proposal links and schedule

Week 12 - Final Project Proposals part 2

• Notes on Machine Learning - RNN/LSTM
• Proposal links and schedule

Week 13 - User Testing

Week 14 - Final Presentations

References and Inspiration

• Moved to references wiki

Tools

• p5.js
• p5.js on GitHub
• p5.js CDN
• Node
• RitaJS

JS reference books

• JavaScript: The Definitive Guide
• Eloquent JavaScript, Marijn Haverbeke
• Beginning JavaScript, Paul Wilton and Jeremy McPeak

Learning / Intro

• CodeAcademy: JavaScript
• How to learn JavaScript properly
• JavaScript the right way
• Code School
• JavaScript garden
• A re-introduction to JS by Mozilla
• JavaScript 101 from JQuery

Tools

• Checking code: JSLint / JSHint
• Browser debugging: Chrome Developer Tools (tutorial) / Firebug (tutorial)
• Mobile debugging jsconsole.com
• Sharing code snippets (useful for asking questions): gist.github.com

Requirements

• You are required to attend all class meetings and submit all weekly assignments and a final project.
• Grading (pass/fail) will be based on a combination of factors:
  • Attendance, participation in class discussion, and engagement in other students' projects (25%)
  • Quality of assignments (50%)
  • Final Project (25%)