Organizing your project Your project will involve a number of components. This may include raw data, processed data, documentation, source code, and code for dependencies. You may be working as part of a team, or you may be writing code that others will use in the future. In either case, your project should be organized so that someone unfamiliar with the project can quickly find the information they need, whether these are datasets or functions in your code.

Environments Building your Environment When creating a digital project it is important to know what underlying software, platforms, libraries, code, etc. we are utilizing. By keeping track of these elements we can make sure that our future work and that of researchers that build upon our efforts can execute our codes. But this can be a very time-consuming task especially when it is not built into the workflows that we may already use in our day-to-day practices.

Git and GitHub In this lesson, we will talk about version control with Git and GitHub. Some of you might have already heard about it or even used it. Git is a very popular version control tool mostly used by developers but it can very well be applied to non-coding projects as well! You could use it to write a paper or to manage your dataset. If you do develop code, however, you should not live without Git or another version control system.

Motivation and Rationale If you are going to take the time to build computational tools for humanistic research, you want others to be able to reproduce what you did. You want others to be able to verify your results, but also to use the tools you built to further their own projects. Reproducible research may be an unfamiliar concept to many humanists, but its motivation in the Digital Humanities is to ensure that other people will be able to use and modify the computational tools you have taken the time to build.