This repository contains the materials for Session 1 of Applied NLP.

• Slides: see slides/ folder
• Notebooks: see notebooks/ folder

• Course overview and expectations

• “Words as data”: treating literature quantitatively

• From Al-Kindi’s frequency analysis to Shannon’s information theory

• Measuring text features: word frequency, entropy, punctuation, pronouns, color words, gender representation

• Examples from Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve

• Bechdel Test as a measurable criterion

• Set up your GitHub account and accept the invite to the course organization

• Fork and clone today’s starter repository

• Initialize your personal project repository for the semester

• Choose your author and working language (solo or small team)

• Draft an initial research question (e.g., sentiment over chapters, topic trends, stylistic fingerprinting)

• Short reflection: why this author/text? what you plan to measure

• Complete repo setup and make your first commit (README + checklist)

• Texts can be profiled with simple, reproducible metrics

• Historical ideas (frequency analysis) connect directly to modern NLP (information theory)

• A clear author choice and research question will guide all subsequent sessions

Before starting, please fork this repository and create a fresh Python virtual environment.
All required libraries are listed in requirements.txt.

⚠️ If you encounter errors during pip install, try removing the version pinning for the failing package(s) in requirements.txt.
On Apple M1/M2 systems you may also need to install additional system packages (the “M1 shizzle”).

# Select Python version (if using pyenv)
pyenv local 3.11.3

# Create and activate virtual environment
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

# Upgrade pip and install dependencies
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Select Python version (if using pyenv)
pyenv local 3.11.3

# Create and activate virtual environment
python -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1

# Upgrade pip and install dependencies
python -m pip install --upgrade pip
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Select Python version (if using pyenv)
pyenv local 3.11.3

# Create and activate virtual environment
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/Scripts/activate

# Upgrade pip and install dependencies
python -m pip install --upgrade pip
pip install -r requirements.txt

You’re now ready to run the session notebooks!

Deactivate the environment when you’re done:

deactivate