Introduction

Welcome to the University of South Carolina Libraries Data Services Lab Notebooks! We aim to lower technological barriers for researchers, making modern research tools more accessible. Hence, this repository is set up to share introductory notebooks, code, and tutorials that can help a researcher get started with a new tool wherever they are with their research and skills. This will be an evolving page with notebooks added as they are created.

These notebooks support many stages of the research process, including data management, analysis, and visualization. Most of these guides are in Python, but there are a few R tutorials as well. The notebooks provide structured, hands-on lessons that guide users through analyzing metadata, counting words, creating visualizations, and applying natural language processing techniques. They are beginner-friendly and ideal for learning Python programming and digital humanities methods in an accessible, reproducible format. Each notebook includes annotated code, explanatory text, and interactive elements that help users learn both technical and conceptual skills.

Getting Started

Since command line skills can be useful, we start with a notebook introducing those concepts. Project Jupyter is an open-source platform comprising standards, a community, and tools. Jupyter Notebook allows users to combine code, data, equations, and narrative text in a single interactive document.

Basic Linux and Command Line Skills
Getting Started with Jupyter Notebooks

Acknowledgements

This is a compilation of notebooks from several people. Big thank you to Nathan Kelber and Ted Lawless for writing many of these notebooks for the Constellate platform. Thank you to Ithaka for sharing Constellate (sunsetted July 1, 2025) with us for three years. Also, thank you to William Mattingly from the Text Analysis Pedagogy Institute for sharing his notebooks. Thank you Patrick Wolfe, MLIS ‘22, who wrote a few notebooks for the Libraries as an intern in the spring of 2022. Finally, thank you to Vandana Srivastava, AI/Data Science Librarian and Meara Cox, USC 2026 graduate, for setting up this page and adding notebooks.