The Programming Historian is a website which publishes “novice-friendly, peer-reviewed tutorials” designed to help teach historians “digital tools, techniques, and workflows.” It is aimed at helping historians who identify as “technologically illiterate” to become programming historians. If you’re a historian and you want to know how to set up an Omeka site, or edit an oral history using Audacity, then The Programming Historian is a place to learn how and where to get started.

Clicking on the English-language portal presents us with three options: we can Learn, we can Teach, or we can Contribute. Learn takes us to the lessons and Contribute provides links to pages with information for those interested in writing a lesson or becoming one of the reviewers. Teach has little beyond a link to provide feedback on ways to make the lessons better suited to being used as teaching tools. We’re going to Learn today.

Clicking on learn brings up all the lessons that you can access. There are 78 lessons available in English, which is quite a few to browse through.

The Programming Historian provides a few ways to organize the lessons to make it easier to find what you’re looking for. At the top, you can click on buttons to display all the tutorials that are tagged with one of five categories: Acquire, Transform, Analyze, Present, and Sustain. 30 lessons fall under the category of Transform, making that the largest of the five categories.
The next way to sort the lessons is by more specific criteria: for example, you can click to see all the lessons tagged with “Web Scraping” (only 6) or lessons that have to do with the programming language Python (19 lessons – second only to “Data Management”).
Finally, you can sort the lessons by their publication date or by their difficulty. Lessons are given a difficulty – Low, Medium, or High. These difficulty lessons appear to be assigned based on the difficulty of the subject matter covered by the lesson, not the difficulty of using the lessons to learn the programming tool.

Let’s click on the lesson “Up and Running with Omeka.net”. This is a lesson designed to help historians set up their own content on Omeka.net.

The lesson is all text and images – no video or audio. The lesson reads like a longer version of one of our digital tool reviews, featuring walkthroughs of how to use the digital tool. When I say “longer,” I do mean significantly longer – here is the table of contents for the Omeka.net lesson:

And here is what the content of the lesson looks like:

The lessons all seem well-written and informative. However, they are not infallible: several lessons have notifications that reviewers have caught inaccurate information. Rectifying these errors is dependent on the website administrators contacting the authors and then having the authors correct the mistakes in their lessons.

Overall The Programming Historian seems to be a very helpful resource for any historian looking to expand their technical skills.