Talk Python To Me #538: Python in Digital Humanities
Feb 28, 2026
David Flood, a digital humanities developer on Harvard’s DARTH team, builds web platforms, archives, and tooling for research. He talks about keeping grant-funded sites alive by baking dynamic apps into static sites. He dives into client-side search with PageFind, running tooling in the browser with WebAssembly, and practical strategies for long-term archival and reuse.
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PhD Hobby Coding Led To DARTH Role
- David Flood learned Python during his PhD by watching videos while doing dishes and later used biologist phylogenetic tools to analyze textual variants.
- That hands-on tinkering led him from humanities into a full-time DARTH role at Harvard.
ETL Is The Research Doorway To Useful Apps
- A major early task in humanities projects is converting messy spreadsheets into a normalized Postgres data model to enable search and visualization.
- DARTH uses Django, tests, and parsing logic to handle fuzzy dates and varied multilingual names.
Amendments Project Indexed 22,000 Failed Proposals
- The Amendments Project indexed ~22,000 proposed US constitutional amendments into Postgres full-text for public discovery.
- The project revealed a large corpus of failed amendment proposals and now faces plans to archive without Elasticsearch.