Program and Code

Coding Consultations

Need guidance in or assistance with coding, software development, scripting, and programming?  

We are proud to provide programming & software development consultation services to support digital scholarship at GW. This service provides assistance from software developers for GW students, faculty, and staff who are working on an academic or scholarly inquiry which requires coding. Some consultation help we have provided:  

• Code review and debugging
• Tools selection
• Working with data markup and encoding (e.g., XML, JSON, CSV, RDF)
• Retrieving data from websites and APIs
• Harvesting and working with social media data  [link to SFM]
• Data cleaning and manipulation
• Databases (e.g., table design, querying, optimizing, loading)
• Full-text searching
• Online exhibits
• Data visualization

For assistance focused on statistical computing packages (such as R, Python, SPSS, SAS, STATA, and others), please refer to our Data Consulting service.

How can I request assistance?

Make an appointment with us.  Appointments are available either in-person or via WebEx.  You may book up to two consultations per week.  You may also email libcoding@gwu.edu for any questions about appointments.

Please provide your own device and software, as needed, for your consultation.  Library computers will not be provisioned to support software development activities.

Who is eligible for consultation?

All GW students, faculty, and staff are eligible for free coding assistance with an appointment. Tutoring is not available. For assistance with computer science assignments, please contact your TA or professor.

What languages or tools can I get help with?

Library developers have special expertise in the following areas, but staff with other areas of expertise may be enlisted as necessary. If you don't see the area in which you need assistance listed below, please feel free to email libcoding@gwu.edu with your specific need and we will attempt to identify help for you.

Programming languages:

• Python
• Ruby
• Java
• Javascript
• Bash shell scripting

Databases:

• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• Lucene/Solr

Markup:

• HTML
• XML
• JSON

Other tools:

• Social media data
• APIs
• Web scraping

What are some examples of ways I might use these services?

• You need to perform an analysis which will require some coding, and you'd like assistance selecting the appropriate tools and guidance on how to learn those tools.
• You've developed a script, but need assistance improving its performance.
• You've written a program, but can’t figure out why it won’t work.
• You need assistance developing a web site to collect data.
• You've digitized a set of documents and need guidance on how to share/display them online.

What are some examples of what is "not" an appropriate use of this service?

• Computer Science (or any SEAS) assignments. SEAS peer tutoring is available to students enrolled in SEAS courses.
• Writing entire programs or doing all work for researchers
• Tutoring
• Providing hosting or ongoing computing resources
• Anything with a direct cost (e.g., licensing software, cloud computing)
• Filling the function of a TA for a class