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Your Final Project
This semester you have been exposed to only a handful of Digital Humanities tools and methods. Mostly we’ve tied this exploration to some of the more broad concepts in Digital Humanities. We discussed Prism and TEI Guidelines when talked about close reading in DH; we used Voyant and touched on topic modeling as we discussed distant reading; we worked with Regular Expressions and Python for making text files do what we need them to do, whether we’re cleaning data or writing bots.
Along the way we’ve also touched on the efficacy of these methods in exploring humanities research questions of all stripes. All the while, we’ve turned the humanistic on the tools and methods when possible, to interrogate and push against assumptions about the convergeance of “digital” and “humanities.”
For your final projects I’ll ask you to bring these two strains together in an exploration of a tool that you apply to a humanities (or humanities adjacent) question of your own. You’ll note that this is a conflation of two aspects of the syllabus covered under Assignments and Grading: the “low-barrier tool” exercise and the final project itself. The final projects can be completed by you alone, paired with a partner, or as part of a small team. The length of the proposal and presentation will grow accordingly, but not necessarily double (or triple, etc).
- The question that you explore can be completely original to this assignment or it can build on research that you’ve undertaken in another class (or for your Junior IS, or for your Senior IS). While the question can be something that you’re building upon, your process – your methods and your rationale for those methods – must be unique to this course. (See additional details below.)
- As for the method or tool, you can choose from the curated list of tools below or you can propose another tool or method altogether. You’ll just need to run this by me in your proposal. (You may want to check in with me before drafting your proposal if you want to make sure you’re on the right path.)
The Parts
- Project Proposal (500 words, Due 20 APR)
This is the rationale for the undertaking. In your proposal you’ll identify the question that you want to explore and you’ll outline the context of that question: did you work on this in another setting? Where does the question come from? In your proposal you’ll also identify the tool or method that you’ve chosen. If you want to employ a tool or method not listed below, you should run it by me first. - Presentation (Due on 2 or 4 MAY)
You’ll sign up for (or be assigned, if you’re indifferent) a slot to give five-minute presentation in which you:- Identify your research question
- Explain the utility of the tool or method you’ve chosen for your research question (i.e. how does this tool help answer or represent your research?)
- Demonstrate your findings (i.e. show off the fruits of your labor)
- Reflection and Submission (500 words, Due 5 MAY)
- Submission requirements and protocols will vary depending upon your project. In most cases, I’ll want you to be able to link me to your project from our class GitHub repository in the same way as we’ve done heretofore. Some projects may be more complicated and you may need to serve them as pages on the GitHub site that you created. I’ll help you through this part, if needed, on a case-by-case basis.
- The reflection will be more straightforward. As in the past, you’ll draft a reflection and post it to your journal space in the course GitHub repository. Your reflection should do a few things.
- First, it should be a space for you to flesh out (in prose) any of the points from your presentation that need a little more attention. Did you have particular challenges? Did you learn something especially interesting? Talk a little more about those things.
- Next, it should demonstrate your facility with Markdown and with writing for the web as a genre. Your writing should be well structured and you should take advantage of hyperlinking (everything is inter-twingled). You might embed screenshots from your presentation to help illustrate (literally) the points you’re making. (Protip: you’ll have to post them somewhere in your github account and link to them.) You should also, where possible, embed your slideshows. Used powerpoint? Maybe upload your slides to SlideShare (it integrates with LinkedIn).
- Finally, it should (as always) be well-written. 500 words is a minimum suggestion; you’re likely to need more words. Take them. Just don’t rewrite your IS.
Potential Tools/Approaches
Tools covered in class. You can continue to work with a tool or method with which we’ve worked in class.
Other Tools/Methods. Some of these we may have touched on in class but not fully explored. Others will be new to you altogether but should be something that you can learn in a reasonable amount of time.
- StoryMap
- SoundCite essay
- Juxtapose
- Twitter Analysis
- Advanced Data Visualization
- Topic Modeling
- (You may want some extra help with this one: it’s less “plug and play” and more “try and see”.)
Something Else? If there’s a different tool or method that you want to use, talk with me about it. You’ll have to frame it terms of the question that you want to ask: always fit the tool to the research question and not vice versa.
An Introduction to Digital Humanities by Jacob Heil is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.