Think and Compute: a Primer for Digital Humanists

This is the official book written by Silvio Peroni, with contributions of Ivan Heibi and Arcangelo Massari, for the Computational Management of Data course of the second-cycle degree in Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge of the University of Bologna. The intent of this book was to have open and free material to provide to students to learn the basics of Computational Thinking, Code Programming, and Data Management in Python.

In case you want to mention or cite the book in documents, please use the following reference:

Peroni, S., Heibi, I., Massari, A. (2025). Think and Compute: a Primer for Digital Humanists. https://thinkcompute.github.io

Think and Compute: a Primer for Digital Humanists © 2025 by Silvio Peroni, Ivan Heibi, Arcangelo Massari is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.

Table of Contents

Preface

• Try. Make mistakes. Learn. Repeat.

Part 1: Basics of Computation

• Introduction to Computational Thinking
• Algorithms
• Computability
• Part 1: Exercises

Part 2: Basics of Programming

• Programming Languages
• Organising information: ordered structures
• Brute-force algorithms
• Organising information: unordered structures
• Recursion

Part 3: A Python Laboratory

• Getting started with Python
• Python basics - Variables, types, and operators
• Working with lists and tuples
• Working with unordered structures
• Recursion and working with files
• Data analysis on Netflix shows

Part 4: Additional Algorithmic Techniques and Data Structures

• Divide and conquer algorithms
• Dynamic programming algorithms
• Organising information: trees
• Backtracking algorithms
• Organising information: graphs
• Greedy algorithms