This document, prepared by the members of the MIT Digital Humanities Lab, will guide you through contributing to the Gender Analysis Toolkit.
We welcome your help in making this project more expansive and applicable to a broad range of humanities researchers.
We welcome contributions in the form of code, documentation, and filed issues. The purpose of the Gender Analysis Toolkit is to develop tools for literary analysis and research as it intersects with gender studies. If there’s a tool you wish existed to make your research more robust, feel free to contribute. We are particularly interested in additions to our analysis module.
If you would like to contribute code, but are not sure where to begin, please take a look at the list of currently open issues.
You can suggest a new feature or report a bug via our project’s issue tracker. This will start a conversation across the project’s community about how best to address the issue. To understand best practices for filing an issue, take a look at GitHub’s Issues Guide.
Within the Digital Humanities Lab, testing and documentation are valued highly and are a priority. Towards this aim, we use the Python doctest module throughout our code. For those who don’t know how to implement doctest, read our Testing and doctest tutorial. Every method, as part of the documentation, should include a doctest. These should be thorough and cover a wide variety of test cases and most importantly, these test cases should pass. If you’re having an issue with a particular doctest, leave a note in your pull request.
Most of our code is written in Python, so if you need any advice on our in-house conventions, refer to the Digital Humanities Lab Python Style Guide. If you have questions, don’t hesitate to ask!
Make sure you read the Code of Conduct before contributing. The MIT Digital Humanities Lab project is a space of collaboration and community; keep that in mind and maintain respect and professionalism throughout your interactions.
With that, we would like to thank you for all the awesome work you’re going to do.