DH Project Report

Rationale

If we’re going to spend the semester conducting digital humanities research and working on projects, it might be useful for us to see some finished projects ahead of time. Looking at examples like this can provide us with inspiration for what we try to do.

But we can do more than just look: we can do some research and reflection, considering what works and what doesn’t. Asking and answering the same question Miriam Posner poses—“how did they make that?”—will prepare us to be thoughtful about what we want to accomplish as we work on Peanuts.

Nitty Gritty

In this assignment, you will do a deep dive into two digital humanities projects. You will become an expert on your projects and in particular look to understand what questions they seek to answer, how they are organized, and what technologies and methods they use. This assignment has two parts: a presentation and a paper.

Presentation

On Wednesday, 22 January, you will deliver a 10-15-minute presentation on your two projects. You will cover most of the same points that you will write about in your paper (see below). You should plan to walk us through portions of the sites to help demonstrate your points. The bulk of the presentation should be explanatory rather than evaluative, but you can provide your thoughts on the projects as you go. You should conclude the presentation by summarizing what you’ve learned by investigating these two projects.

This is not something that you should just wing. Feel free to bring in notes or a script and to practice beforehand.

Paper

Using 12-point Times New Roman font and 1-inch margins, you will write a total of six to seven pages for this assignment’s paper.

For each project, you will write two pages (no more, no less). In these pages, you should do your best to answer the following:

  • Who made the project?
  • What are the goals of the project?
  • Does the project have an argument (in Scheinfeldt’s sense)?
  • Who is the project’s intended audience(s)?
  • What are the project’s sources (Posner’s term)?
  • How were the sources processed (Posner’s term, again)? In other words, what specific methods or technologies were used to change the data?
  • How was the project presented (Posner’s final term)? What tools were used to bring the project online in a human-readable object?
  • What are the project’s conclusions? In other words, what did the researchers learn after all their hard work?
  • How long did the project take from start to finish?
  • Which “scholarly primitives” does the project employ and/or enable?
  • What are the strengths and weaknesses of the project?

For the fifth page, you will compare and contrast the two projects along any axes that seem relevant to you.

For the sixth (and optional seventh) page, you will write a reflection on this assignment. Some questions to consider in your reflections are:

  • What did I learn about research from this assignment?
  • What did I learn about digital humanities from this assignment?
  • What would I change about this assignment to make it more relevant, informative, enjoyable, challenging, or interesting?

Although I’m asking you to tackle some very specific questions, the paper should not be written in bullet points but instead with paragraphs. Think of this as two reports and a conclusion.

The paper must be emailed to me as PDFs before class begins on Monday, 27 January. Please name your file “last name”-projectreport.pdf (e.g., croxall-projectreport.pdf).

Additionally, please post each of your two-page project evaluations to our site as blog posts, one post for each project.

Projects

Below is a list of projects that you could evaluate. If you find another that you would like to choose instead, please email me first. Each project can only be claimed by one person, so when you know what you want to work on, send me an email to claim your projects!

Grading

Your grade for this project will be based 60% on your paper and 40% on your presentation.

Your presentation will be evaluated on its clarity, organization, and discussion of what you’ve learned.

Your paper will be graded on how well it meets the requirements outlined above, as well as clarity, organization, attention to detail, and clarity. I’m persnickety about spelling, grammar, and punctuation. You probably know this by now.

Credits

This assignment is an update of one that I created in 2011. That assignment benefited from interactions with Ryan Cordell and then drew on language and ideas from Jason B. Jones and Mark Sample. The 2018 update relied heavily on concepts from Miriam Posner’s “How Did They Make That?” The 2019 update was inspired by Tom Scheinfeldt’s “Where’s the Beef?”