The attempts to get TANDEM to run past the OCR on my system have continued to come up short. Stephen has — in his ever calm and wonderfully practical and helpful way — tried to help me remotely, but even commenting out the lines that were throwing errors, I haven’t figured out why my computer isn’t recognizing the nltk install that it seems to have in the folder. I swear I’m not attempting to run things from the trash!

I have kept the various twitter activity moving, but outreach remains in a holding pattern while I attempt to get more python moving forward. I’m doing the Django Girls workshop next weekend, and, now that my team is assigned and it is a team of people from outside of DH, things are feeling more serious, so I’ve been reading through Python for Kids and slowly plodding through code academy. My enfeebled brain is flailing somewhat pitifully in the sea of commands and shortcuts it is attempting to navigate. I’m also reading tons about textual editions, which seems relevant to TANDEM in terms of understanding text as image. Still going to muddle through these distinctions.

This week, I aim to learn enough Django to help Steve more effectively. I hate feeling like my attempts to understand the code and get the dependencies working only lead to more head thumping and hair tearing. It’s horribly frustrating to feel unhelpful. The difficulties I face though, remind me why TANDEM will be a hugely helpful tool. The software barrier to some of these types of analysis are no small thing. It is worthwhile to relieve users of the task of setting up the software domino chain of dependencies so that they can go about the business of running the analysis.

So that’s where I am this week in TANDEM.

P.S.  If you are looking for a brief distraction, check out the twitterbots I made last week. @StoryMakerBot and @dissertitle. I have been #picturebookshare-ifying (illustrating) the StoryMaker for stress relief this week.