As I download and install Anaconda so that I can learn natural language processing with SpaCy, I suddenly understand why so many humanities scholars are so reluctant to learn code. It feels like trying to cook a meal in an unfamiliar kitchen, in the dark. If, like me, you are expected to teach this stuff, you also feel like a fraud. It's good, but it's also a genuinely discomfiting experience.
@litteracarolina at the CHR conference in Paris last year there were a lot of Americans, I'd say big names in their Digital Humanities association. I mentioned that I recently started teaching a course on Cultural Analytics and asked them where do they think I should start. They all agreed: the console. Melanie Walsh was not there, but one could feel her "presence" (https://melaniewalsh.github.io/Intro-Cultural-Analytics/). Theirs was not a satisfactory answer for me, because one doesn't even know what OS students are working with, but there's something in this. Getting used to working with a command prompt, instead of a GUI is an important first step towards getting used to anything coding and Python in particular (think ipython). I hope this helps. Good luck!
@mapto That is helpful, thank you!