Digital humanities sounds niche, until you realize it can mean a searchable archive of U.S. amendment proposals, Irish folklore, or pigment science in ancient art. Today I’m talking with David Flood from Harvard’s DARTH team about an ...

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Harvard's DARTH (Digital Arts and Humanities) team developer David Flood discusses how Python and Django power grant-funded research websites, and the critical challenge of keeping those sites alive after funding ends. The core strategy: convert dynamic Django apps into static sites using tools like Django Bakery or Frozen Flask, then replace server-side Elasticsearch with PageFind, a client-side search library that builds pre-computed indexes from HTML files. For projects needing full functionality, running Django entirely in the browser via WebAssembly (Pyodide + PGLite) is an emerging option. The episode also covers real-world projects like a 22,000-entry U.S. constitutional amendments database, a Celtic folklore archive, and a pigments database for Asian art. David shares his personal journey from humanities PhD student with zero coding experience in 2019 to full-time developer at Harvard, and reflects on how AI coding tools might have prevented that career path by letting him accomplish research goals without acquiring deep technical skills.

Python in Digital Humanities