Historic Python, and Lightning Talks

Jean Bauer is a Digital Humanities Librarian at Brown University, speaking about using Python for history! Thanks to Turbine (http://turbine.com) for sponsoring the night.

Ever wonder about transcontinental information networks before the telegraph? Do you like the idea of Thomas Jefferson buying shoes for Abigail Adams? Then you might be interested in Project Quincy (http://projectquincy.org), the Django/MySQL software package that powers The Early American Foreign Service Database (http://eafsd.org) and allows historians to trace social and information networks over time and space. Jean will talk about how her work in Python is allowing historians to find new connections using databases, manuscripts, interactive visualizations, and even some old fashioned shoe leather. Project Quincy was originally written in Ruby on Rails, so this is also a conversion narrative!

We also have a handful of lightning talks on ocean science, fixing Unicode, and other topics.