This course, The JavaScripting English Major, was created by Moacir P. de Sá Pereira to be used, initially, in the 2017 course “Novel Maps of New York,” taught as part of the Digital Literary Studies sequence in the English Department at NYU.

Intellectually, this course owes its greatest debt to Marijn Haverbeke’s book Eloquent JavaScript, which is available both online for free and in an elegant paperback. The title is a nod to The Programming Historian. The scope here is much smaller, of course, but I have tried to use that site as a model, in its efforts to provide tutorials and training to people without backgrounds in programming.

More information about the project in general is available in the zeroth chapter.

If you enjoyed this course, consider letting me know on Twitter, where I tweet as @muziejus.

Technical details

I wrote the first draft of this course in Vim on the eighth floor (and sometimes sixth) of Elmer Holmes Bobst Library in July and August of 2017. The code I wrote in Atom in order to get a better sense of it as a drafting environment. It’s great! Except for the part where it’s not Vim, which, once you’re used to, infects all text generation you do (like typing :w when you’re done with a draft of an email in gmail…).

The pages are all written in Markdown. The site is then generated by jekyll / jekyll. When I like how things look, I push it to GitHub Pages. Hence there’s also a GitHub repository.

I built a rather simple, custom theme for the course, which is a customized version of Bootstrap. The body font is Georg Duffner’s EB Garamond, a free version of Claude Garamont’s classic. The display and code fonts are variants of the Ubuntu Font Family. I typically use DejaVu for my code font, but I liked the relationship the Ubuntu Sans and Mono create across the page. The color scheme is a rather arbitrarily applied version of Ethan Schoonover’s Solarized.

Finally, this course is entirely free and covered under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. That means you’re completely free to share or adapt this material as long as you give credit and maintain the license. But I also await GitHub pull requests if you find something about the course upon which you think you could improve! Just fork the repository and get in touch.

Acknowledgments

In addition to the above acknowledgments, I have to thank NYU (and its English Department) for giving me the opportunity and encouragement to teach courses like the one that will be using this text. I was encouraged along the way in some way by Annie Ali Khan, Manan Ahmed, Alex Gil, Kirin Wachter-Grene, Audra Grigaliūnas, Kovas Boguta, Michael Cardarelli, Steven Vance, and the screenwriter who vacuums the eighth floor of Bobst in the mornings.

Also, the impetus for this course came from a workshop I was supposed to lead on Leaflet at the 2017 edition of NYC DHWeek. A snowstorm led to its cancellation, but I always wanted to still share the knowledge with the people who signed up. Sadly, my presentation slides by themselves would not have been sufficient. Then, while speaking with Jonathan Reeve in the Spring about the folly of teaching proprietary mapping software with crippling license fees (hello, Esri!) or one-trick pony tools that students would use for a week and then forget, it dawned on me that I evade both at once by teaching a language with applications beyond mapping (JavaScript) that also could help my students in making mapping projects (with Leaflet).