The Finished Projects
The Facts and Fiction of Jesse James
Tripp Tokioka, Elias Hillman-Emelianoff, Max Votruba, and Lloyd Stohler
— Process and progress posts
Carleton Demographics vs. Tuition and Comprehensive Fees
Karla Cruz Sanchez, Jasmine Maldonado, Julian Tanguma, Bem Abebayehu, and Nathan Wang
— Process and progress posts
Carleton Football: What Statistics Correlate to Wins?
Anthony Baldenegro, Marcus Merkelbach, Ntense Obono, and Jacob Ventura
— Process and progress posts
Carleton Student Origins
Isaac Lund, Sam Merritt, Paul Jung, Arlo Cornell, and Newton Pham
— Process and process posts
Modeling Old Carleton
Aurelia Peterson Rajalingam, Jane Parson, and Breanna Lefevers-Scott
— Process and progress posts
Sculptures at Carleton
Maddie Smith, Helana Solomon, Kattie Meraz, Claire Saunders, and Adiana Contreras
— Process and progress posts
The Assignment
The final projects for the course will revolve around a topic of your choice from Carleton’s history . The local holdings of our college—its historical, literary, artistic and physical archives—constitute our data set. Collectively, we will use new digital technologies to tell stories (well-researched, carefully documented, scholarly sophisticated stories) of how Carleton’s past inhabitants built, filled, inhabited and experienced the spaces that we encounter (or no longer encounter) today.
You and your group will therefore design and execute a DH project using the tools and platforms of your choosing and keyed to your discipline of choice. All projects will make use of local resources, including the holdings of the Carleton College archives, local newspapers from the Northfield historical society, literary works set in the local environment, environmental data, or other types of data available through our course library guide. Part of your research will therefore involve getting out from behind the desk and into the community to gather real world data. The projects must:
- Be based on some aspect of Carleton’s history, using primary sources taken from the College Archives, the Northfield Historical Society, or another approved college or online data source
- Include an interactive visualization or interface to your source data
- Incorporate a strong narrative, storytelling element leading the user through your data
- Include a discussion of your sources (data), processes (methods), and presentation choices (platform and audience).
- Be hosted on hhfinals.dgah.sites.carleton.edu,
- and be presented with clear narrative introduction, bibliography and supporting documentation in a web-publishing platform of your choice: WordPress, Omeka, custom HTML, etc.
Final digital projects could take the form of
- 3D models and simulations
- A series of data, network or text visualizations using platforms like Flourish, Palladio, or Voyant Tools
- interactive web maps, timelines, or visualizations using pre-existing platforms like Omeka, ESRI Story Maps, Story Map JS, TimelineJS, etc.
- narrated movies using iMovie or other software
- etc. etc.
Your project will be pitched in week 7-8, detailed and refined in week 8-9, published and presented in week 10.
Component 1 — Project Pitch and Team Charter (Week 7-8)
Form a group of 3-5 and choose or invent a project (drawing on the brainstorming document). Collectively write a blog post the lays out your project pitch and group charter.
Project Pitch
- Members of the group
- The project topic and objectives for what you plan to produce
- The proposed methodology:
- Sources: What data do you hope to use and how do you hope to find it?
- Processes: What tools and techniques will you use to gather sources and store your data?
- What analyses or transformations will you conduct on those data?
- Presentation: How will you present the results and integrate the digital assets you create as an interactive final product?
- A link to one or more DH projects that you think might make a good model for what you plan to do.
- Create a unique tag for your group to tag all your posts going forward.
Group Charter
Good collaboration doesn’t just happen! It takes open and sometimes difficult communication. One way to take the trouble out of group work is to lay out issues using a “project charter” (see examples from the Praxis Program at Scholars’ Lab). Determine the following about your group:
- What are your shared values? Shared goals? Expectations for each other?
- How will you communicate and handle disagreements?
- Assign group role. Who will be responsible for calling meetings or posting to WordPress? Cleaning data? Creating Visualizations? Setting up and editing the project website?
- Consider each of your strengths and weaknesses, as well as schedules in terms of workflow.
Specs:
- Post to WordPress by Friday Week 8
- Tag with your final project
- Submit link on Moodle
- No word count, but address the above questions for both Pitch and Charter
Component 2 — Project Update and Source Documentation (Week 8)
The thing that makes archival materials so captivating is also what makes them challenging to work with in a computational way. Most of you will not be working with perfect data sets. They will require cleaning – or tidying – to get them in a state that can be used by digital tools. Sometimes you need to add data (like coordinates) or remove data (like personal information).
This project component asks you to collectively write a blog post on the course blog that fully documents the sources you’ll be using and gives an update on your progress.
I recommend writing this out on a shared Google Doc and appointing one person to post by Sunday.
Specs:
- Post to WordPress and submit the link on Moodle.
- Tag with your final project consistent tag
- No word count, but the longer the better.
- A list of the sources you plan to use with full citations and links. Each source should include a brief annotation (bullets are fine) that addresses the following:
- Format – what format is this source in? What format does it need to be in? What do you need to do to get it there?
- Rights – who owns this material? What are you allowed to use? How do you know?
- Privacy/ethics – Who is depicted in this data? How? Is there sensitive information that needs to be removed? Any other ethical considerations?
- A brief update on the progress of your project:
- What have you done so far, what have you gathered, and what have you built?
- What applications/languages/frameworks have you selected and how are you going to implement them?
- What issues have you run into? Have they forced you to change your initial plan?
Component 3 — Data Visualization (Week 9)
These will usually be built in a platform outside of your final project website and embedded within it.
Specs: for this lab, embed at least one of your group’s visualizations in a brief post in which you describe
- what the data are (based on what sources, cleaned/filtered how)
- what tool or technique you used to visualize it
- what the data viz is doing (exploratory or explanatory, showing what patterns of interest, etc.)
- what you have done to style the visualizaiton to increase its clarity
This need not go into all the detail of the goal of the project, sources and methods (save that for the final website!), but should show how are using digital tools to interpret the sources you gathered for your project.
Component 4 — Publication (Week 10 and Finals)
Projects will be published IN SOME FORM by class on Tuesday, Nov. 14 but not finalized.
After getting feedback on the presentation in class, the FINAL VERSION OF YOUR PROJECT IS DUE BY 5:00 pm on the last day of Final Exams (Monday, 11/20).
- One member of each group should write a blog post giving a brief introduction and providing a link to the final project.
Component 5 — Presentation (Week 10)
On the last day of class each group will give a Pecha Kucha style presentation on their completed and published project. The rules of such a presentation are below, with credits for the format going to Ryan Cordell, via Jim Spickard.
A Pecha Kucha 1/1/5 Presentation
In this presentation, you will have exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds to present your material: 20 slides that auto-advance every 20 seconds. These presentations will follow the Pecha Kucha presentation format. Here are the rules:
- You will have exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds.
- Your presentation will use PowerPoint (or Keynote or Google Presentations), but you’ll be restricted to 20 slides. No more, no less. Period.
- Each slide must be set to auto-advance after 20 seconds. No clickers, no exceptions.
- Your presentation must also follow the 1/1/5 rule. You must have at least one image per slide, you can use each exact image only once, and you should add no more than five words per slide.
- Your images can be some of the ones you used for your project itself, screen shots of your process, or illustrative ones gathered from the internet.
- You can find Creative-Commons licensed pictures by searching through Google’s Search Tools. Click HERE for a guide to using Google Images’ tool for doing this.
- Every group member must present. You may trade off between your members however you see fit, but the presentation should be rehearsed and polished.
You should not attempt tell us everything that you might say in a written paper nor explain every nuance of your argument. Instead, you should be looking to give us an overview of the project and highlighting its particular strengths. When designing the presentation, think SHORT, INFORMAL, and CREATIVE. Perhaps surprisingly, the Pecha Kucha form’s restriction (paradoxically) promotes this creativity.
See an example presentation at the bottom of our last lab page.
