For most of the last decade digital humanists doing data analysis have chosen between R and Python. But in the past few years, the Javascript ecosystem has blossomed in a way that makes it a viable–and dare I say, fun–way to collaboratively share, explore, and analyze data. Students don’t need to install anything to start a lesson, collaborators can work directly with you in real time, and anyone who can code can easily add interactive sliders, controls to unlock datasets for others.

This workshop will provide an introduction to building and sharing data analysis for and of the web using observable notebooks. We’ll explore the basic platform, and how it improves on python- or r-based notebooks you may have used; introduce the arquero and vega-lite packages that allow data manipulation and visualization; and talk about some strategies for making even the largest datasets explorable to anyone with a smartphone.