Hi, good afternoon! My name is Aileen Tierney and I’m an English PhD student going into my third year at the University of Iowa. As a Digital Studio Summer Fellow, I spent my summer learning how to code in Python in addition to reading relevant subjects in my field of study (contemporary literature) such as electronic literature, digital poetry, and how to use code as pedagogy and art rather than being a solely goal oriented tool.

I found this time during the summer really useful, since I’m in a pretty pivotal stage of my program where I’m beginning to move into independent study. Developing skills such as self-motivation and time management is especially important as I’m transitioning from being in a classroom setting with readings and expectations already selected for me, to a more self-directed pace as I begin to work towards my dissertation. There definitely pros and cons to both stages, since the responsibility of setting and following through with your own goals is… pretty hard to do, but over the summer I’ve become more and more excited about the prospect of diving solely into my research interests.

My goal for the fellowship differed from a lot of my peers’ goals since I was concentrating more on skill acquisition rather than working on a tangible project. I completed an Introduction to Python course on a great website called Udacity, which was completely free, and had resources such as Youtube videos walking through a concept and a coding area where you can try out practice problems and see whether the code works or not. I’d really advocate this as a resource if anyone’s interested in learning a coding language, since it was completely asynchronous and pretty easy to use.

Since I spent a good amount of my time merely trying to wrap my head around what is going on in a block of code, I thought it would be a good idea to show an example of a script that I wrote myself. This is one of the final practice problems in the course that I mentioned, and it’s basically a generator that takes an input, someone’s first and last name, and spits out a type of flower that also begins with your first name’s initial.  Revolutionary, I know. But I’m pretty proud of it, since it finally works. I actually was having a weird issue with it this week since it wasn’t working in my terminal for some reason, and my studio contact Nikki was really trying to help me with it and we couldn’t find out what was going on. If I were teaching a class or something I’d be like “okay let’s try and troubleshoot why this isn’t working” and heckle my students into finding the problem. But last night my system updated or something and it miraculously worked, which further confirmed my belief that sometimes walking away from something for the night or a few days, taking a lap, and coming back to it is a great and productive practice.

Going forward, I’d like to continue learning more advanced skills in Python. Which is funny because when I got to the end of the course, it basically was like “You know that really frustrating math stuff we made you do like figuring out how to code a factorial? Actually, you can just download these library packages that just does it for you.”  But you have to know what to do in the first place. I’m anticipating using Python for textual analysis and possibly more creative stuff like interactive poetry generators. As I wrap up, I’d like to thank my studio contact Nikki White for her help during the summer, the Graduate College, as well as our course instructor Stephanie Blalock for the hard work and attention she’s given to everyone, and I’m looking forward to continuing to work with the Digital Studio in the future! Thank you for your time.