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DH Project Review

Due 13 FEB

CoRE Components

• Understanding the variety of Digital Humanities projects.
• Identifying the core humanistic question(s) at work in a given DH project.
• Illuminate the kinds of research/questioning the project facilitates.

The Big Idea

For this assignment, you’ll choose a Digital Humanities project from the list below and you’ll answer a few big and a few specific questions about the site.

• What are the questions the project tries to answer?
• Is there a humanistic question at the core of the project?
• What are the questions we might ask of the project?
• Why does it exist?
• Who made it?
• How long has it been around.
• As best as you can discern, how does it work?

You’ll write a short paper (750-1000 words) based on your analysis. Additionally, you’ll give a short presentation to the class (7 minutes) based on your analysis.

Sites for Consideration

• I’m From Driftwood
• Interactive Map of Race and Real Estate in Cleveland
• Mapping Inequality
• Mapping Metaphor
• Mining the Dispatch
• Redlining Richmond
• Rosetti Archive
• Soweto ‘76
• Transcribe Bentham
• Visualizing Emancipation

Criteria for evaluation

The Written Part

You shouldn’t merely answer the questions listed above. Use them to guide a well-crafted evaluation of your digital humanities project. You should demonstrate evidence of understanding how projects can reflect humanistic concerns via digital expression or methods.

Your review essay should be well-written, by which I mean cohesive with clearly articulated arguments and well-wrought prose. Your sentences should build one upon the other as you walk your reader through your carefully chosen evidence. You may experiment with the format; as we’re writing in Markdown and for our GitHub page, you may think about appropriate uses of section headings to organize your paper and signpost your arguments for your reader. Do not think of the use of sections as a crutch, however. Your ideas within the sections must hang together while ensuring that the sections – as parts of a whole essay – work together to create a coherent final product.

The Presentation Part

You will give a brief (7 minute) presentation on your findings. This can be a little more structured and scripted, mostly because 7 minutes is not a long period of time. You should make sure you address these points:

• What are the project’s details?
  • Why does it exist?
  • Who made it?
  • How long has it been around.
  • As best as you can discern, how does it work?
• What is “humanities” about this project?
• What questions would you as the project’s directors if you had them in the room?

Screen-based visuals are required. Slides are optional, but you’ll certainly want to be able to use the project’s site to underline your points.

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Booking Meetings

Course Archive: 2017

An Introduction to Digital Humanities by Jacob Heil is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.