Hi Folks, In preparation for the workshop "An Introduction to XAFS Data Analysis`: with Athena and Artemis (and Larch)" in Krakow this Sunday, I thought it might be helpful to send out a brief description of what we have planned. First, as you may have heard, Bruce Ravel and Shelly Kelly were originally going to give the workshop, but neither were able to travel to the conference. At the same time, Mauro Rovezzi and I began discussing doing some sort of workshop on Larch and Python for XAFS Analysis. The result is that the workshop will be something of a hybrid. We'll try to cover as much of an introduction to XAFS Analysis as can be squeezed into one day, while also giving some time for presentations and discussion of more advanced scripting and programming for XAFS Analysis with Python and Larch. The workshop has about 50 participants, so there will be a variety of levels of familiarity with XAFS and XAFS Data Analysis. We will begin with a brief introduction and description of XAFS and then jump into data processing and reducing XAFS data and doing Fourier transforms. We will then go a simple but illustrative case of XAFS Analysis using Feff calculations. Accounting for breaks, we have about 4 hours to cover XAFS Theory, Processing, and Analysis. This material is often presented in a three or four day workshop, so we are going to skip some topics, and the practical aspects of doing the analysis will have to be more of a demonstration than a hands-on tutorial where we all go through each of the analysis steps together. The lectures and presentations of data reduction and analysis will follow the description in M. Newville, Reviews in Mineralogy and Geochemistry (2014) 78 (1) 33-74. https://doi.org/10.2138/rmg.2014.78.2 A version of this with color figures is at https://millenia.cars.aps.anl.gov/gsecars/data/Larch/2018Workshop/NewvilleEXAFS_RIMG78_ColorPreprint.pdf Most of the material and figures I will present will be very similar to this. You may find this to be a useful backup and reference for topics that get skipped. In addition, copies of the overheads, data, and analysis scripts used will be available at https://millenia.cars.aps.anl.gov/gsecars/data/Larch/2018Workshop/ Since the workshop is meant to be an introduction, the main goal is to get you familiar with the principles of the analysis and with the software. Fortunately, there will also be lots of XAFS experts around for a full week after the workshop, and plenty of time for delayed follow-up questions. For the software itself, we will be using Larch for all the processing and analysis. If you would like to install this and follow along, please download Larch version 0.9.40, available at https://millenia.cars.aps.anl.gov/xraylarch/installation.html. I *strongly* recommend that you install one of the "installers" in the link above. We will have presentations and discussions in the later part of the workshop about using Larch as a Python library, and indeed Larch can be installed into a number of Python environments. If you want to install Larch in a manner other than one of the installers, I am willing to try to help either in advance or later in the week, but will not be able to spend any time on Sunday with installation problems.